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REVIEW OF THE DECADE 1857-67. 



BY 



H. 0. OAEET. 




PHILADELPHIA: 
COLLINS, PRINTER, 705 JAYNE STREET, 

1867. 






Called upon to furnish a Preface to a new edition of one of the German 
translations of his work on Social Science, its author has availed himself of the 
opportunity thus presented for comparing with his theory the facts that have 
occurred in the remarkable decade that has elapsed since the date (1857) of its 
first appearance. 

Philadelphia, June 22, 1S67. 



REVIEW. 



§ 1. Desiring fully to understand and properly to appreciate the men 
around us we study their antecedents, and thereby, in some measure, 
qualify ourselves for predicting their probable future. So is it, too, with 
nations. That we may understand the direction in which they are 
moving, whether toward civilization, wealth, and power, or toward 
barbarism, poverty, and weakness, it is needed that we compare their 
present with their past and satisfy ourselves as to whether their policy 
has tended in the direction of developing those qualities which constitute 
the real man, the being made in the image of his Creator, fitted for be- 
coming master of nature and an example worthy to be followed by those 
around him, or those alone which he holds in common with the beasts of 
the field, and which fit him for taking place among men whose rule of 
conduct exhibits itself in the robber chieftain's motto, " that those may 
take who have the power, and they may keep who can." 

Such was the design of the work that is now to be reproduced, and to 
which its author has been requested to furnish this present preface. That 
by such a mode of inquiry, and such alone, could he have expected to 
arrive at anything approaching to correct results, will be obvious to 
all who reflect how wholly useless would be any calculations as to the 
time or place of arrival of a ship based upon a mere statement of her 
actual position at any given moment, unaccompanied by information as 
to the rate of movement in the past, or the direction in which she was 
heading in the present. A decade having now elapsed since the date of 
the observations that then were taken and the predictions that then 
were furnished, and the various ships of state having steadily been moving 
in their various directions, opportunity is now afforded for further obser- 
vations with a view to determining how far their several movements 
have been in accordance with the anticipations that then were made, and 
for thus subjecting to the severe test of actual practice the principles upon 
which the work itself was based. That it is which its author proposes 
now to do, but, preparatory thereto, he desires to ask the reader's atten- 
tion to a brief exposition of the gradual development to which, and almost 
insensibly, he has been led, of the grand idea of the unity op law, so 
soon, as he believes, to be adopted as the necessary complement of the 
great one so recently developed, but already so almost universally ad- 
mitted, that Of UNITY OF FORCE. 

The first step, so far as regarded Societary Science, ever made in that 
direction, consisted in furnishing a theory of value so simple that, in the 
words of one of the highest authorities in economical science, "there 



I 

could not arise a case in which a man should determine to make an 
exchange in which it would not be found to apply."* 

Up to that date, amid the many suggestions as to the " nature, measure, 
and causes of value," there had been none, to quote again from the 
same high authority, that had not proved to be " liable to perpetual 
exceptions." The law then furnished was that of the labor saved, the 
limit of value being found in the cost of reproduction.^ Subsequently 
adopted by an eminent French economist,! it has been made known to 
tens of thousands who had never seen, or even heard of, the work in 
which it first was published. 

Simultaneously therewith was demonstrated the existence of a natural 
law of distribution applicable to auy and every case that could by any 
possibility occur, whether between the landlord and his tenant, the laborer 
and his employer, the lender of money and its borrower, the owner of 
ships and the man who sought to freight them. Likewise adopted by 
M. Bastiat, and characterized by him as " the great, admirable, consoling, 
necessary, and inflexible law of capital, "§ it constitutes the second step in 
the direction of proving that in each department of the social relations 
there is perfect unity, and that the whole are as much subjected to law, 
absolute and inflexible, as are those of inorganic matter. 

Ten years later, another step in the same direction is found in the proof 
that then was furnished, that in the great work of developing the powers 
of the earth at large man had always, and necessarily, pursued a course 
identical with that he is seen to have pursued in reference to each anil 
every of its parts, passing from the poorer to the richer soils precisely as 
he had passed from the use of stone to that of copper, from copper to 
iron, and thence to steel ; and from the use of mere human power as the 
exclusive means of transportation, through the ox and the horse, the 
cart and the wagon, until at length he had reached the railroad car. "|| 
Here again we have a unity of law and a harmony among men, directly 

* "Carey, and after him Bastiat, have introduced a formula <t posteriori, that 
I believe destined to be universally adopted ; and it is greatly to be regretted 
that the latter sbould have limited himself to occasional indications of it, 
instead of giving to it the importance so justly given by the former. In esti- 
mating the equilibrium between the cost to one's self and the utility to others, 
a thousand circumstances may intervene ; and it is desirable to know if there 
be not among men a law, a principle of universal application. Supply and 
demand, rarity, abundance, etc., are all insufficient, and liable to perpetual 
exceptions. Carey has remarked, and with great sagacity, that this law is the 
labor saved, the cost of reproduction — an idea that is, as I think, most felicitous. 
It appears to me that there cannot arise a case in which a man shall determine 
to make an exchange, in which this law will not be found to apply. I will 
not regard it as equivalent, unless I see that it will come to me at less cost of 
labor than would be necessary for its reproduction. I regard this formula as 
most felicitous ; because, while on one side it retains the idea of cost, which is 
constantly referred to in the mind, on the other it avoids the absurdity to 
which we are led by the theory which pretends to see everywhere a value 
equivalent to the cost of production; and, finally, it shows more perfectly the 
essential justice that governs us in our exchanges." — Ferrara : Biblioteca dell'' 
Economista, vol. xii. p. 117. 

f Carev. Principles of Political Economy, vol. i., Philad., 1837- 

j Bastiat. Harmonies Economiques, Paris, 1850. § Ibid. 

|| Carey, Past, Present, and Future, Philad., 1818. 



opposed to that discord which resulted necessarily from the idea that 
whereas, in regard to all the parts of the earth out of which machines 
were made man, was always passing from the poorer to the better with 
steady improvement in his condition, when he came to the occupation of 
the whole he pursued a course that was entirely different, passing always, 
and necessarily, from the richer to the poorer soils, and thus bringing 
about a state of things in which a constantly increasing portion of" the 
human race must " regularly die of want." On that occasion, it again 
was shown that unity of the law by which the whole was governed tended 
necessarily and certainly towards harmony among those for whose use the 
earth had been created. 

Further reflection having led him to the conclusion that the laws which 
thus far had been exhibited were but parts of a great and harmonious 
system instituted for the government of matter in all its forms, whether 
those of coal or iron, fish or birds, clay, corn, oxen or men ; that the 
Creator of the Universe had not been obliged to institute different laws 
for government of the same matter; that the physical and social laws 
were, therefore, one and the same ; and, that the idea of unity of lav: must, 
at no distant day, become as clearly susceptible of proof as is now so 
rapidly becoming that of unity of force; he availed himself in the work 
of which the present is a condensation,* of the familiar phenomena 
of heat, motion, and their effective forces in the physical world, for 
illustration of corresponding facts and forces in the societary one — the 
result having been that of showing that, with societies as with individual 
men, physical and mental development, health, and life, had always 
grown with growth in the rapidity of circulation and declined as the 
circulation had been arrested or destroyed. 

§ 2. In the decade that has since elapsed the accumulated contribu- 
tions of leading physicists have gone so far towards demonstration of the 
doctrine of the correlation and conservation of the forces known in their 
several distinctive manifestations as heat, light, electricity, magnetism, 
and chemical affinity, that it may be now" regarded as entirely esta- 
blished. The new philosophy resolves all these subtle agencies into 
modes of motion, asserting that they are all capable of mutual conversion ; 
that they are one and the same force, differing only in its manifestations 
and effects ; that their various mutations are rigidly subjected to the 
laws of quantity ; that the force of the form assumed is the precise 
equivalent of that which disappears ; and, therefore, that every mani- 
festation of force must come from some pre-existing equivalent force, and 
must give rise to some subsequent and equal amount of force in another 
form. Originating with Count Romford and Sir Humphrey Davy, this 
grand idea was left to be rounded into its present fulness and symmetry 
by a host of men of the present clay, among whom may here be men- 
tioned Grove and Helmholtz, Meyer, Faraday, Liebig, and Carpenter.f 

The identity and convertibility of these subtlest of forces have abun- 
dantly justified the analogies which had thus far been assumed between 

* Principles of Social Science, 3 vols., Philad., 1857-59. 

f The several writings of these authors on this subject have been collected 
and published by Professor Youmans, with an introductory preface, to which the 
author here acknowledges his obligations. 



the beat and motion of matter and the forces of societary life, but the 
choice of electricity, as the preferable analogue, would give us now a 
greatly larger and happier application of the correspondence. Retaining 
all the persistency of the heat into which it is convertible, it presents a 
far more striking resemblance to the brain power which is its corre- 
spondent in societary life. So striking indeed is it, that when in the 
world of mind we desire to express the idea of rapid action of the socie- 
tary thought and will, we find ourselves driven, and that necessarily, to 
the physical world for the terms to be employed, availing ourselves of 
those of electricity and magnetism. 

So universal is this force that -.11 the combinations and decompositions, 
all the processes of dissolution and reconstruction, are effected through 
its agency. In organic structures, vegetable and animal, that agency is 
intimate, pervading, and essential. Between it and the nerve force 
physiologists scarcely find a trace of difference, except that of absence of 
subjection to the human will. Ever present, it serves to vitalize the 
globe, and in its most obviously manifest movements, as in those which 
as yet are most inscrutable, it stands for the best correspondent to mental 
and moral action that imagination could devise. 

Franklin, assuming that the fluid was simple, or uncompounded, - 
the names positive and negative to its modes of manifestation. Other 
philosophers have preferred the names vitreous and resinous, thereby sug- 
gesting the idea of a compound nature in the fluid, and all the analogies 
seem to favor this presentation of the case. A mere disturbance of elec- 
trical equilibrium might perhaps explain the movements of lightning in 
the atmosphere, but certainly docs not at all account for electric affinities 
of the positive and negative manifested in the various processes of chem- 
istry. 

Rubbing and rubbed bodies acquire opposite electricities, the contact 
and interaction requiring the sort of co-relation which subsists between 
an acid and an alkali. That contact is combination, not mere aggrega- 
tion — distinctive individuality being here, as in every department of 
Societary life, the condition of perfect association. 

Substances assume vitreous or resinous electricity in adjustment to the 
conditions or capacities acting or acted upon. Woollen cloth is strongly 
vitreous with zinc, but with gold or iron it is resinous. Such mutations 
occur in all electric bodies, varying in their intensities, also, under the in- 
fluence of diversely related substances. Here, again, do we find a beautiful 
analogy to the law of societary association — an infinitely varying adapta- 
tion to, and influence upon, the infinitely varied individualities required 
for giving rapidity to the societary circulation. 

This force of immeasurable and resistless energy flows silently, gently, 
imperceptibly, through perfect conductors, supplying its currents of 
vitality to the whole organic world. Disturbed, resisted, or misdirected, 
it blasts and crushes, on the contrary, every obstacle encountered in its 
course; and here, again, do we find a perfect correspondence to the social 
force. The actual relation of each and every member of a community, as 
giver and receiver, teacher and learner, producer and consumer, is positive 
and negative by turns and relatively to every difference of function and 
force in his associates, the whole mass constituting a great electric battery 
to which each individual contributes his pair of plates. Perfect circulation 



being established, as a consequence of perfect development of all the 
various individualities, the economic force flows smoothly through every 
member of the body politic, general happiness and prosperity, improved 
mental and moral action, following in its train. When, however, by 
reason of failure on the part of those charged with exercise of the co- 
ordinating power of the State, the circulation is obstructed, capital 
misused, and labor abused, the gentle vital force is converted into thunder- 
bolts, whose existence is made manifest by the presence of consuming 
fires. The broken balance rushes by a pathway of ruin to regain its 
equilibrium, the war of elements thus presented being the correspondent 
of the strife engendered by resistance to the laws of human life. 

The production of electricity, or its excitation for use, requires order 
and relations that are full of snggestiveness to those who desire fully to 
understand the conditions upon which, alone, there can be a prosperous 
and permanent societary life. Zinc and copper plates, promiscuously 
piled, are mere rubbish, powerless as the fragments of any other waste. 
Let them, however, be connected in orderly alternation, and the range 
may continue indefinitely with increase of latent force, ready upon the 
instant when the circuit shall be completed to gather together at one 
extremity the whole accumulated negative, and at the other the whole 
accumulated positive, and thus present an active force sufficient to bind 
and unbind the ebments of matter ; to penetrate to the innermost parts 
of their constitutions ; to subdue their resistance to its will ; to shatter 
to atoms the largest masses ; or to enable man to hold instant converse 
with his fellow men throughout the earth. 

Turning now to the societary organization we find the precise parallel 
to all this, poverty and weakness being the lot of all those communities 
in which, as in Turkey and in Ireland, the human plates are promiscuously 
piled, and in which, as a necessary consequence, there is little or no cir- 
culation, wealth and power, on the contrary, growing everywhere in the 
ratio in which each and every pair of plates is placed in proper relation 
with each and every other ; the vitalized circuit being thus established 
throughout the entire mass and made to bear, with the concentrated 
energy of the whole, upon every object of general interest. For the 
establishment of such order and consequent production of such action it is, 
that men, as is now being shown in all the new communities of the southern 
and western hemispheres, are led to grant to certain individuals exercise 
of the power of co-ordination, a course of proceeding directly opposed to 
the doctrine of laisser /aire. The more this power is exercised in the 
direction of promoting rapid circulation among the plates of which the 
great battery is composed the greater is the tendency to development 
of an inspiration and an energy closely resembling the service of the 
lightning of heaven subdued to human use. The more the reader 
shall make himself familiar with the wonderful force of which, even yet, 
so little is known, the more, certainly, must he be struck with its ex- 
traordinary correspondence with the life forces that govern the destinies 
of the race, and the more must he be led to arrive at the conclusion that 
the author has not erred in taking it as the force required for illustrating 
social action, and for aiding in the study of social science. 

§3. "To Nature," says Professor Tindall,* "nothing can be added; 

* Heat considered as a Mode of Motion. 



from Nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is con- 
stant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in 
the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the 
never-varying total, and out of one of them to form another. The law 
of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves 
may change to ripples, and ripples to waves — magnitude may be substi- 
tuted for number, and number for magnitude, — asteroids may aggregate 
to suns, suns may resolve themselves into florae and faunae, and florae 
and faunae melt in air, — the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls 
in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy, — the manifestations 
of life, as well as the display of phenomena, are but the modulations of 
its rhythm." 

We have here, according to Dr. Faraday, "the highest law in physical 
science which our faculties permit us to perceive, that of the conservation 
of forces." But recently discovered, it seems now to have become the 
crown of the edifice of that great system of law by means of which har- 
mony is secured throughout the whole range of matter, from the coral 
insects which build up islands that are to form the nuclei of continents 
to the innumerable suns, with their attendant planets, of which the uni- 
verse is composed. 

By unity of force, and unity and universality of law, is here intended 
that persistency of impulse and constancy of action in the multiform 
substances and subjects of natural law, which is found to follow them 
through all their mutations of form and modifications of office, exhibit- 
ing an infinite variety of phenomena, yet without any change of essence 
or of intrinsic qualities and necessary tendencies in action. The cohe- 
sive attraction which produces and maintains the forms of material 
things, though apparently controlling, cannot be regarded as the aboli- 
tion, or the temporary suspension, of that law of gravity which governs 
all masses of matter at all distances ; for it is not so destroyed or sus- 
pended. It clings to every atom as persistently and permanently as the 
existence of the atom itself, for it is a condition of its existence. The 
disintegrating force of gravitation abides, and is as active in the integ- 
rity of the resistant forms of tilings as it is when displayed in their 
decomposition. Nay, cohesive attraction thus exhibiting an apparent 
opposition to, or difference from, the attraction of the planet, is proba- 
bly the very same force acting with greater effect by virtue of the greater 
proximity of the atoms in the defiant form ; just as an under-ground 
water-current descends from its source in one hill, and ascends from 
beneath the intervening valley to the crest of the neighboring height, 
pressed upward to its point of issue by the very same force which car- 
ried it downwards from its spring-head. In a multitude of familiar in- 
stances we in like manner learn to find unity and even identity, where, 
in appearance, we seem to see diversity and "opposition. 

It is certain that every atom of matter must carry with it through all 
changes of form and action the entirety of the properties which make it 
what it is ; else the earth and the universe would have no constitution, 
and could not be the subject of any law. 

This doctrine is not fate, but fact; not materialism, but order, organ- 
ism, law, government. In its extension to all its subjects it trenches 
neither upon life, liberty, will, morals, religion, nor responsibility ; it 



9 

only affirms that the matter in man, as in the rest of the universe, is 
subject to positive, permanent, and universal rules of action, and that all 
of his functions which involve material agencies aud relations, fall under 
the laws which arise out of their constitution. If by the terms mind, 
spirit, or immateriality, nothingness is meant, all inquiry, and with it all 
discussion is at an end, for of nothing we know nothing: but if mind 
is a something, a substance, an entity, it too must have a constitution 
and laws, and neither its will nor liberty is lawless. And surely we are 
safe in saying that if mind bears any relation to matter or substance, 
however transient in duration, it cannot be even conceived of as totally 
exempt from, or unfurnished with, such answering or correlative powers 
aud properties as are necessarily required to qualify it for such co-ordi- 
nated existence and reciprocal action. 

The unity of which we speak, as in all other instances in which the 
idea is used among men, is not identity or sameness, but the harmony of 
correspondence — unity by relation, fitness, or co-operation, effected by 
such continuity of character and force of all substances through all 
spheres of being, and all adaptations of use as alone can constitute a 
universe of the atoms and individualities which it embraces — of that one 
entire system " whose body nature is, and God the informing soul." 

Physiologists exhibit the functions of human life as divided into indi- 
vidual, or vegetable, on the one hand, and relative on the other ; the 
organs of the first of these classes being uniformly single, while those of 
the latter are as uniformly double and symmetrical There are two 
kinds of blood to be circulated, and for each there is a heart, the two 
being joined together as by a party wall, bnt not in any sense, as with 
the eyes and ears, a pair, of which each performs the same office. The 
life of relative functions consists in their connection with, and their 
action upon, the physical aud societary world; and it is by means of that 
action that the real man is gradually developed. Deprived of these 
there would remain nothing proper to the man, and he could have no 
existence beyond that of a mere vegetable life — such a life as would be 
that of a solitary individual placed in the heart of the rich prairies of 
this Western continent. Of self-government — of the exercise of will — 
he could have none whatsoever, nature being there all-powerful, and he 
himself being weakness personified. Let him have a companion, and at 
once his proper human life is awakened ; the opposing electric states of 
consumers and producers, givers and receivers, teachers and learners, 
having been induced, just as air awakens the quiescent lungs, and as 
light kindles and informs the eye, the real man then coming into exist- 
ence, just as, by reason of association with his fellow-man, he is enabled 
to feel that he really has a will, and has ceased to be the absolute slave 
of nature. 

The closer and more intimate the contact of these men, and the more 
rapid the circulation of ideas and services, the greater is the tendency 
toward development of the faculties peculiar to each, toward further 
combination, further friction, and further rapidity of circulation. Other 
men, their wives and children, now arriving, the phenomena are with 
each and every step in this direction repeated and intensified, human 
force steadily growing at the cost of Nature, and man obtaining by slow 
degrees that exercise of Will so entirely at first denied. Population 



10 

steadily increasing, there arises that diversification in the demand for 
human force which leads to new developments of the various faculties 
of each and every member of the association, but in order to such 
development there must be that orderly arrangement which we see 
to be required in a galvanic battery, producers and consumers — the 
electric poles — being brought in close relation with each other. The 
closer those relations the more rapid becomes the circulation, and the 
more the power of self-government. The greater that power the more 
rapid is the growth of man's ability to compel Nature to yield in full 
abundance all the things required for maintenance and enjoyment of life 
and for further development of human force; and the more rapid the 
growth of that feeling of responsibility which scarcely at all exists in 
the barbarian, tlie slave, or the pauper of civilized life. The more these 
great questions shall be studied the more will it become obvious that man 
— the real max, capable of the exercise of Will and responsible for his 
actions — holds his existence in virtue of laws of universal force and 
effect, ami, that the teacher who fails to familiarize himself with them, 
and with their bearing on societary and Christian life, fails in the per- 
formance of his duty to his Creator and to his fellow-men.* 

§ 4. For the production of a sound state of morals it is indispensable 
that there be that freedom of the will which results from having power 
to direct to human service the wonderful forces of nature. That such 
power may exist it is as indispensable that there be in the societary 
body that same orderly arrangement of the positives and negatives — 
producers and consumers — which is seen in every well organized factory, 
in every properly appointed ship, in the administration of every well con- 
ducted road. To that end it is needed that there he such prompt and 
vigorous exercise of the power of co-ordination as may be required for 
removing obstacles to the societary circulation, and for enabling each 
and every of the millions of pairs of plates of which the battery is 
composed to be put in relation with each and every other. How won- 
derful is at times the effect of such action is shown in the case of Spain, 
as exhibited in chapter ix. of the present volume, and yet further in the 
following passage from a recent work describing the same period there 
referred to, that in which the discovery of the compass and of the art of 
printing, and the establishment of order throughout the kingdom, com- 
bined for producing the electrical effect that is here described : 

" The human mind is like a hive. The dormant mass seems dead ; but 
shake it and you will find that it is alive. Another shake — and your 
ears are struck by a low and confused hum — a murmur of discontent 
perhaps at its repose being disturbed — and then comes out a flight of 

* " We must improve the sanitary condition of the people. Until this is done 
no civilizing influence can touch them. The schoolmaster will labor in vain ; 
the minister of religion will labor in vain ; neither can make any progress in the 
fulfilment of their mission in a den of filth. Moral purity is incompatible with 
bodily impurity. Moral degradation is indissolubly united with physical squalor. 
The depression and discomfort of the hovel produce and foster obtuseness of 
mind, hardness of heart, selfish and sensual indulgence, violence and crime. 
It is the home that educates the family. It is the distinction ami the curse of 
barbarism that it is without a home ; it is the distinction and the blessing of 
civilization that it prepares a home in which Christianity may abide, and guide, 
and govern." — Baker. The Common Nature of Epidemics. 



11 

thoughts, which, like busy bees, scatter far and wide, some distilling 
honey, and others checking intruders with their sharp stings. It is not 
astonishing that, in such a reign, during which the mind and soul were 
so much excited, literature, the arts, and sciences should have acquired 
such a prodigious development, particularly when fostered by the favor 
of a princess who patronized them with fond love and intelligent appre- 
ciation. Pompey had boasted that, if he stamped his foot, armies would 
spring up from the bosom of Italy. At the gentle beckoning of Isabella, 
there sprang up in Spain a host of men who distinguished themselves as 
tneologians, jurists, historians, physicians, astronomers, naturalists, 
lyrical and dramatic poets, linguists, musicians, and successful explorers 
through the whole range of human knowledge."* 

Compare with this the present poverty, the famines, the wretchedness, 
the demoralization of Ireland, of India., of Turkey, and then inquire into 
the causes of the existence of so deplorable a state of things, and it will 
be found that it results from the fact that their people exercise no Will — 
that the several nations are mere creatures in the hands of others that allow 
no power of self-government. Turn theu to the advancing countries of 
Europe, and see that they become more moral iu the proportion that they 
acquire self-direction, and that the power for such direction grows in 
the precise ratio of the judicious exercise of the power for so co-ordi- 
nating the various forces of society as most effectually to bring into 
connection the opposing electric poles, and thus most to stimulate the 
rapidity of the societary movement, f 

§ 5. Self-reliance, and the power to command the confidence of others, 
grow with growth in the habit of self-government. To the individual 
who has them in possession they constitute forces always applicable to 
his service, and as much constituting portions of his capital as do the 
skill of the mechanic, the scientific knowledge of the chemist, or the 
learning of the judge. Uoth grow and extend themselves throughout a 
community in the direct ratio of that judicious exercise of the co-ordina- 
ting power which is required for removing obstacles to association, and 
for enabling producers and consumers — the positives and negatives of 
the great battery — to put themselves in close relation with each other 
and thus to make prompt demand for all the human forces that are 
from hour to hour produced. 

* Gayakre. Philip the Second, p. 322. 

f That the scientific method of inquiry is inadequate, and inapplicable to the 
higher study of man, is a widely prevalent notion, and one which seems, to a 
great extent, to be shared alike by the ignorant and the educated. Holding the 
crude idea that science pertains only to the material world, they denounce all 
attempts to make human nature a subject of strict scientific inquiry, as an in- 
trusion into an illegitimate sphere. Maintaining that man's position is supreme 
and exceptional, they insist that he is only to be comprehended, if at all, in some 
partial, peculiar and transcendental way. In entire consistence with this hypo- 
thesis is the prevailing practice ; for those who, by their function as teachers, 
preachers and lawgivers, profess to have that knowledge of man which best 
qualifies for directing him in all relations, are, as a class, confessedly ignorant of 
science. There are some, however, and happily their number is increasing, who 
hold that this idea is profoundly erroneous; that the very term " human na- 
ture" indicates man's place in that universal order which it is the proper office 
of science to explore ; and they accordingly maintain that it is only as li the ser- 
vant and intepreter of nature" that he can rise to anything like a true under- 
standing of himself. — Yocjians. Lecture on the Scientific Study of Human Nature. 



12 

That this is so will be seen on careful examination of the operations of 
all those communities of Europe whose policy tends to give to its farmers 
so much of self-government as results from exercise of power to choose 
between a domestic and a foreign market. That the reverse of this exists 
in all the cases in which producers and consumers become more widely 
separated — that the moral force declines as the circulation becomes more 
and more obstructed — will be seen on study of the past and present course 
of things in Ireland, India, Turkey, and all other countries in which, by 
reason of failure to exercise the co-ordinating power, the men who culti- 
vate the land become more and more dependent on distant markets, and 
more and more deprived of power to determine for themselves whether 
to sell in the near or distant one. Poor, wretched, and wholly depend- 
ent on the will of others, they and all other countries similarly situated, 
furnish abundant proof of the accuracy of the North British Review, 
(March, 1807) in asserting that it is only "in the free development of the 
natural forces, whether of morality, intelligence, or of material wealth," 
that the "balance of power" will be found, and, that "it will be always 
held by the country which, in proportion to its powers, has economized 
its material resources to the highest point, and acquired the highest de- 
gree of ascendency by an honest and constant allegiance to the laws of 
morality in its domestic policy and in its foreign relations." 

That "balance" has for a long period been mainly held by France and 
England, the two nations that, of all others, have been most persistent 
in their determination so to exercise the power of co-ordination as to 
bring into close relation their own producers and their own consumers, 
and thus to establish orderly relations among the many millions of human 
positives and negatives of which their populations have been composed: 
although now, of all, the most determined to urge upon others rejec- 
tion of the policy they have so long pursued. The reason for this may 
perhaps be found in the fact that that " balance" tends to pass into other 
hands, and for the Eastern continent into those of a people of Central 
Europe which stands now indebted for the power it has so lately mani- 
fested to its adoption of that system which had been elsewhere seen to 
tend so largely to the development of all " the natural forces, whether of 
morality, intelligence, or national wealth" — that one under which man 
has been most enabled to obtain perfect exercise of the power to will, and 
that under which, for that reason, he himself has become most moral, 
and credit most developed. 

§ 6. In the author's definition of capital first given, mental and physical 
force were alone included. To this, as the reader will see (chap, xxxiii ), 
is now added that moral force to which is due the existence of a credit 
system that has in all advancing countries assumed such large propor- 
tions, although but recently it had, in most of them, so slight existence. 
Since the publication of that work a very voluminous writer has given 
to the world a new system, an essential feature of which is found in the 
assertion that "credit is capital, and debts are wealth."* Were this 
so, the man whose expenses so far exceeded his income as to render it 
necessary with each succeeding year to place a mortgage on his paternal 
acres, would be steadily adding to the wealth of the community; while 
his provident neighbor, of equal means, whose income and expenditure 

* McLeod. Dictionary of Political Economy, article, Credit. 



13 

were regularly made to meet, would not. Were it so, the community 
that maintained large armies, and thus produced a necessity for making 
large additions to its funded debt, would be adding largely to the 
country's wealth ; whereas, its more modest neighbor, occupied in paying 
off existing liabilities, would be, with each successive day, so far as gov- 
er mental action was concerned, becoming poorer than before ! 

Wealth grows with growth iu the power to command nature's ser- 
vices. Its existence manifests itself — 

Not in the possession of telegraph poles and wires, but in the power 
thence obtained for speedy transmission of ideas : 

Not in the railroad track, its cars and engines, but in the power thence 
obtained for cheap and speedy transportation of men and merchandise : 

Not in the circulating note, but in the power thence obtained for 
making a single piece of gold do the work for which, in its absence, an 
hundred might be needed : 

Not in the debt itself, but iu the evidence thereby offered of the exist- 
ence of a moral force, giving power to contract the debt. 

At first, Mr. McLeod's suggestions attracted considerable attention, but 
since that time have so far passed away that they would not now be 
mentioned were it not that the author deems it proper to show that they 
differ wholly from those he has above propounded. 

These things premised, we may now enter upon that review of the past 
decade to which he has above referred. 

§ 7. Ten years siuce the author expressed the opinion that Germany, 
whose " national sin for the last two centuries," according to Chevalier 
Bunsen, "had been poverty, the condition of all classes with few excep- 
tions" — Germany which but thirty years before had been held to be so 
greatly overpopulated as to warrant the suggestion of a resort to iu- 
fibulatiou as the only remedy,* — then already stood " first in Europe 
in point of intellectual development," and was " advancing in the phy- 
sical and moral condition of her people witli a rapidity exceeding that of 
any other portion of the Eastern hemisphere, "f 

Since then, an empire has been created embracing a population little 
short of 40,000,000, among whom education is universal ; with a system 
of communications not excelled by that of any other country, with the 
exception of those provided for the very dense populations and limited 
territories of England and of Belgium ; with an internal commerce as 
perfectly organized as any iu the world, aud growing from day to day 
with extraordinary rapidity ; with a market on the land for nearly all its 
products, and, as a necessary consequence, with an agricultural popula- 
tion that grows daily in both intelligence and power ; with a mercantile 
marine that now numbers more than 10,000 vessels ; with a public trea- 
sury so well provided that not only has the loan authorized at the close 
of the late war remained unused, but that it has been at once enabled to 
make large additions to the provision for public education; and with 
private treasuries so well supplied as to enable her people not only with 
their own means to build their owu furnaces and factories and construct 

* Weinhold. Von der Uebervolkerung in Mittel Europa. Halle, 1829. — He pro- 
posed that iiijiliulation should be established by law, and accomplished by 
means of soldering up all males at their 14th year, and so retaining them until 
they could prove that they had the means required for supporting a family. 

f Principles. Chap. xxiv. § 11. 



14 

their own roads, but also to furnish hundreds of millions to the improvi- 
dent people of America, to be by them applied to the making of roads 
in a country the abundance of whose natural resources should long since 
have placed it in the position of money lender, rather than that now 
occupied of general money borrower. 

How rapid has been, and now is, progress in the mechanic arts will 
be seen on an examination of the following facts in regard to iron. In 
1850, the product of steel was valued at $350,000. Ten years later it 
had reached $1,400,000. Five years still later, having meantime en- 
dowed the world with the great gift of the Bessemer process, the figure 
reached was $10,000,000. In 1850, the total value of pig and wrought 
iron was but $15,000,000 ; whereas, in 1865, it had grown to $55,000,- 
000, and all this vast increase was but preparation for new and further 
movements in the same direction, arrangements, as we are told, having 
recently been made for great extension of operations. 

Seeking for a high condition of morals or manners, in either England 
or America, no inquirer would be led to look to the mining regions of 
either the one or the other. Should he, however, be led to turn to Ger- 
many, he would find in a highly interesting little work recently pub- 
lished,* that there 10,000 miners could be congregated together at a 
festival, and without the slighest drunkenness or disorder, either in the 
day or the night that followed. 

Referring to the general social condition of that country the author 
says : — 

" If I ever turn philanthropist, it will be my object to promote all in- 
nocent amusements in my ill-used native land, where it now appears to 
me that our working class are the most abject and degraded slaves com- 
pared to the people here — slaves to a hopelessly hard master — not an 
individual, but an enormous dominant mass of money."f 

Comparing it with Scotland, the land she had left behind, she speaks 
as follows : — 

" Here are no 'gentry' to patronize or tyrannize — no one from whom 
anything is to be hoped ; everyone is dependent on his own industry 
alone. Add to this that all are educated compulsorily; every child goes 
to school ; and any one will plainly understand how immeasurably supe- 
rior in intelligence the working people here are to those at home."! 

How great is the tendency to union among the working people thus 
described is shown in the fact that whereas in 1859 there were but 1S3 
co-operative associations, in 1865 there were 961, 839 of which were 
outside of the Austrian empire. More than half of these were " people's 
banks," the others having been formed for various purposes of produc- 
tion, or for facilitating purchase and consumption. 

Out of the shattered fragments that five and thirty years since passed 
with the world as Germany, there has already been created the most im- 
portant empire of Europe; one whose power for self-defence exhibits 
itself in the fact that it has just now given to the world the greatest 
improvement ever made in regard to the production of that metal 
in the abundance of whose use is found the highest evidence of civili- 
zation ; and in that other most important one that, with only an equal 

* A Summer in the Hartz Forest. Edinburgh, 1865. 

f Ibid., p. 272. t Ibid., p. 275. 



15 

population, the number of young: men that annually attain the age fitting 
them for military duty exceeds that of France by the large number of 
68,000,* the mere surplus being sufficient for meeting the wants of war, 
should unfortunately, at any time, war be needed. f 

To what now, has this all been due ? To the quiet and simple opera- 
tion of the protective features of the system of the Zoll-Verein, long 
regarded by the author as the most important measure of the century, 
and among the most important ever adopted in Europe. Under it labor 
was everywhere economized. Under it, the positives and negatives 
of a whole nation were brought into communication with each°other, 
and thus has been created a great battery of 40,000,000 pairs of plates 
throughout which there is now a rapidity of circulation scarcely else- 
where, on so large a scale, exceeded, and destined ultimately, in all proba- 
bility, to produce effects throughout the Eastern continent fully equal to 
any that may, by even the most sanguine, be hoped for in this Western one. 

The lion and the tiger— the Csesars and Napoleons of the animal 
world — leave behind no evidences of their ever having existed. The 
little coral insect creates islands that endure forever. So is it like to be 
with that great monument just now, and at the trivial cost of a single 
week of battles, erected to the memory of Frederic List and his asso- 
ciates, the humble laborers to whom the world at large stands indebted 
for the formation of the Zoll-Yerein. 

* Baudot, in the Gazette cle France. Quoted in the Zeitschrit't of the Prus- 
sian Statistical Bureau, for ISlif!, p. 129. 

t The following passage, bearing as it does upon the two great events of the 
decade, is given in illustration of the importance of that moral element whose 
development follows necessarily in the train of measures tending to bring into 
communication the positives and negatives of society— producers and" con- 
sumers— and thus to quicken the societary circulation. 

" The plain, simple, unvarnished truth I take to be, that the Prussians uni- 
formly defeated the Austrians because, man for man, they were better aud 
stronger soldiers. They were not so well drilled, they were worse dressed, they 
were not so rapid in their movements, they were far less soldier-like looking ; 
but they were much more ready to encounter danger, they were animated with 
a far higher and more intelligent courage. Physically they were stronger 
stouter, and more powerful men than their opponents ; mentally they were im- 
measurably superior to the mixed hordes of Croats and Bohemians and Hunga- 
rians arrayed against them. They knew, or fancied they knew— which comes 
to much the same thing— what they were fighting about ; they had a strong 
sense of duty ; they were steady, orderly, God-fearing men. From the highest 
general to the lowest private, they had learned how to obey ; and they had im- 
plicit confidence that their officers, whether able or not, were prepared to do 
their duty also. All estimates of the men I have yet seen seem to me to leave 
out of sight the power of what I may call the religious element of the Prussian 
army. You may call it superstition, or bigotry, or fanaticism, as you choose ■ 
but no person who has studied the subject carefully can deny that the Prussian 
soldiers had a sort of reliance in their own cause, as being that of duty and re- 
ligion, which* was entirely wanting amongst the Austrians. The phrase of 
' Holy Prussia,' about which we in England have laughed so often, when it 
was used by the King in his addresses to his people, had a real meaning and 
purport for the Prussian peasant. And so the Prussian armies, in my judgment 
conquered for much the same reason that the Puritans conquered the Cavaliers' 
the Dutch conquered the Spaniards, and the Federals conquered the Confeder- 
ates—because they were more in earnest, more thoughtful, more willing to risk 
their lives for a principle, whether false or true, more imbued with a 'sense of 
duty." Dicey. Battle Fields of ' 1866. 



16 

So will it be, provided that those charged with exercise of the power 
of co-ordination shall always recollect that progress in the past has been 
a consequence of vigorous local action ; that that action tends to increase 
in vigor as agriculture becomes more and more a science; that agricul- 
ture is the last of all the pursuits of man to attain its full development; 
that upon that development depends the growth of mind and morals 
among the people, and of strength in the state; that the obstacle thereto 
is found in the oppressive tax of transportation ; and that relief there- 
from is to be obtained in no manner other than that of the pursuit of 
such measures as are required for bringing into close relation with each 
other the many millions of societary positives and negatives — producers 
and consumers, teachers and learners, lenders and borrowers — and thus 
providing for constant and rapid increase in the societary circulation. 

& 8. Five and thirty years since, Germany and the American Re- 
public exhibited states "of things directly antagonistic, the one to the 
other. The first was divided and disturbed, its internal commerce in 
every way embarrassed, its people and its various governments very poor, 
and with little hope in the future except that which resulted from the 
fact that negotiations were then on foot for the formation of a Customs 
Union, which, five years later, was accomplished. In the other, on the 
contrary, everything was different, the internal commerce having been 
more active than had ever before been known, the public treasury filled 
to overflowing, the national debt on the eve of extinction, and capital 
so much abounding as to make demand, for the opening of mines, the 
building of houses and mills, and the construction of roads, for all the 
labor power of a people that then numbered thirteen millions. 

The cause of these remarkable differences was to be found in the facts, 
that, up to that time, Germany had wholly failed to adopt such measures 
of co-ordination as were needed for establishing circulation among the 
30,000,000 of pairs of human plates of which her society was then com- 
posed ; whereas, the Congress of the American Union had, four years 
before, and lor the first time, adopted measures having for their object 
development of all the powers physical, mental, or moral of its popula- 
tion, all the wealth of its soil, and all the wonderful mineral deposits by 
which that soil was known to be underlaid. The one had failed to bring 
together the producer and consumer of food and wool, and had remained 
dependent upon traders in distant markets. The other had just then 
willed that such dependence should, at no distant time, come to an end ; 
that producers and consumers should be brought together ; and there had 
thence already resulted an activity of circulation and an improvement in 
physical and moral condition, the like of which had never before been 
known to be accomplished in so brief a period. 

Three years later (1835), the two couutries are once again found to- 
tally opposed, Germany having adopted the American system and thus 
provided for freedom of internal commerce, America simultaneously 
adopting that which to Germany had proved so utterly disastrous, and 
which had been then rejected. Thenceforth the one moved steadily 
forward in the direction of creating a great internal commerce, doing 
this by means of a railroad system which should so bind together her 
whole people as to forbid the idea of future separation. The result with 
the one already exhibits itself in the quiet creation of a powerful em- 



n 

pire. The other meanwhile has constructed great roads by means of 
which it has been enabled to export its soil, in the forms of tobacco, 
corn, and cotton, to distant markets, and thus to destroy the power to 
maintain internal commerce — the result obtained exhibiting itself in a 
great rebellion that has cost the country, North and South, half a 
million of lives, the crippling of hundreds of thousands of men, and 
an expenditure of more thousands of millions than, properly applied, 
would have doubled the incomes of its whole people, while making such 
demand for human force, mental, moral, and physical, as would, in a 
brief period, have secured the establishment of universal freedom, with 
benefit to all, white and black, landowner and laborer. Such have been 
the widely different results of two systems of public policy, the one of 
which looks to introducing into society that proper, orderly arrange- 
ment which is found in every well conducted private establishment, and 
by means of which each and every person employed is enabled to find the 
place for which nature had intended him ; the other meanwhile, in accord- 
ance with the doctrine of laisser faire, requiring that government should 
abdicate the performance of its proper duties, wholly overlooking the 
fact that all the communities by which such teachings are carried into 
practical effect now exhibit themselves before the world in a state of 
utter ruin. 

At the date of the first publication of the work of which this volume 
is a condensation, this latter system had, with the exception of the brief 
and brilliant period, 1842 to 1847, prevailed throughout the American 
Union for more than twenty years, and its results, in causing waste of labor, 
waste of raw material, waste and misdirection of mental power, moral 
and political demoralization, and steady growth of the pro-slavery belief, 
were therein fully and freely exhibited.* At that moment, closely following 
on the wonderful discoveries of Californian and Australian treasures, its 
political sea was, to all appearance, calm and unruffled, and its financial 
skies were bright, yet did the author not hesitate to predict that political 
and financial crises were even then close at hand. Scarcely had his 
book been given to the public eye when there broke upon the world the 
great financial crisis of 1857, the most destructive, and, to merchants 
generally, the most unlooked for of all that stand on record. Following 
on .his there came the prostration necessarily consecpient upon an almost 
entire destruction of the societary circulation that had been thus pro- 
duced. So very sluggish was it, notwithstanding the continuance of 
vast receipts from California mines, that capital was petrified, f credit 
was impaired, and the rate of interest throughout the West great be- 
yond all previous precedent. In the history of the civilized world there 
can with difficulty be found a parallel to the waste of physical ami 
mental force that then was taking place. Seeing this, the writer was 
led to believe that the policy of laisser faire was costing the country 
not less than $3,000,000,000 a year, and he has as yet seen no reason 
for doubting the accuracy of the view that is thus presented. 

That waste was at its height throughout the whole presidential 
period which preceded the rebellion. For the products of Northern 

* See Principles of Social Science, Philadelphia, 1857, Chapters xxvi. to xxix. 
■j- See note to page 10. 



18 

agriculture there was almost literally no demand among the manufac- 
turing nations of Europe, the exports of food in that direction in the 
three years that preceded the secession movement having averaged but 
$10,000,000. Corn in the West was then being used for fuel, and thus 
was the producer compelled to lose not only the interest upon his capital, 
but the very capital itself that he had thus invested. Labor power was 
in excess, and men were everywhere wandering in search of such em- 
ployment as would enable them to purchase food. Mills and furnaces 
were abandoned, and so trivial was the domestic intercourse that the 
stock of a number of the most important roads of the country fell to, 
and long remained at, an average price of less than fifty per cent. For 
years the country, under the system of laisser /aire, had been trying the 
experiment as to how large an outlay of labor could be made for the 
accomplishment of any given result, an experiment directly the opposite 
of that which is tried by every successful producer of corn or cotton, 
cloth or iron ; the effect exhibiting itself in the fact that the community 
was paralyzed, and so wholly destitute of force that had the government 
then found occasion to call upon the whole nation for a sum so small as 
even a single hundred millions, it could scarcely have at all been fur- 
nished. 

The day of trial that had been predicted was, however, close at hand, 
three-fifths of the nation, numbering 20,000,000, then finding them- 
selves called, without a moment's notice, to the suppression of a rebellion 
the most remarkable that the world had yet seen ; a work that during 
a period of five years required, on an average, the services of more than 
a million of men, or more than five per cent, of the total population, 
male and female, sick and well, young and old. Not only were those 
services given, but during all that time the men employed were well 
clothed, abundantly fed, and furnished with transportation to an extent, 
and in a perfection, unparalleled in the history of the world. With them, 
too, were carried all the materials required for making, as it may be 
hoped, the monument to freedom in whose construction they were en- 
gaged as durable as we know to have been the great pyramids erected 
by Egyptian monarchs. 

Whence came the extraordinary force that we see to have been thus 
exerted? How was it that a people which, in 1860, had been so very 
feeble could in the succeeding years, have made donations to the extraor- 
dinary extent of a thousand millions of dollars a year ? The answer to 
this question is found in the fact that the conditions of national exist- 
ence had wholly changed, almost perfect circulation having been estab- 
lished throughout a gigantic battery of 20,000,000 pairs of plates, activity 
and life having succeeded to paralysis, and the societary movement 
having become strong and vigorous to an extent that had never before 
in any community been known. For the first time in the history of the 
voi Id there was then presented for examination a nation in .which the 
demand for labor and all its productions went ahead of the supply, en- 
abling both farmer and planter to stop the interest upon capital that 
had so long been petrified in the crudest forms of agricultural production ; 
and, as a necessary consequence, to make demand for the products of 
other labor applied to development of the mineral wealth that so much 
abounded, and to the conversion into commodities fitted for human use, 



19 

of the products of hills and valleys, farms and mines. The secret of all 
the force that was then so well exerted — one so extraordinary as to have 
astonished the world at large — is to be found in that simple principle, 
evidence of whose truth is found in the books of every trader and the 
records of every nation, and which is found embodied in words already 
given — the power of accumulation exists in the ratio of the rapidity of 
circulation. 

What, however, was the force applied ? "Why was it that activity had 
so instantaneously succeeded to apathy — that life and energy had re- 
placed the paralysis that had till then existed ? By most persons answers 
to these questions would be given in the assertion that it had been 
caused by the demands of the government and must terminate with their 
cessation ; and yet, of all who thus might answer there would not be 
found even a single one who could explain how the abstraction from 
other pursuits of the labor of a million of men, and the necessity for 
feeding arid clothing them while engaged in the erection of such a monu- 
ment, could, by any possibility, produce the extraordinary effects that 
had been here observed. 

To attribute the activity and life then existiug to the government de- 
mands is to substitute effect for cause. It was the force resulting from 
an activity of circulation wholly unprecedented in history — one precisely 
similar to that observed on occasion of every connection of the positives 
and negatives of any other great electric battery — that enabled the 
people, not the government, to make the war; and that force existed in 
despite, and not as a consequence, of such demand. That such was 
certainly the fact will be clearly obvious to the reader when he shall 
reflect, that but for those demands the whole million of men so employed 
might have been employed in clearing land, sinking shafts, mining coal 
and ores and combining the two in the forms of lead, copper, and iron ; 
making bricks and lumber, and thus furnishing supplies of raw materials 
to be converted on the spot into thousands of mills and shops, large and 
small, and into the cloth and iron, spades and shovels, coats and hats, 
required for supplying a population among whom the demand for mental 
and physical force so far exceeded the supply as to make it absolutely 
necessary to build engines by tens of thousands, and thus to substitute, 
to the annual extent, of the power of millions of men, the wonderful 
force of steam for that of the human arm. So applied, that same 
force would have produced annually of commodities in excess of what 
was then the actual production, to the extent of thousands of millions 
of dollars, every portion of which would have been in the market seeking 
to purchase labor, thus greatly increasing the laborer's reward. The 
power of accumulation would, under such circumstances, have been more 
trebly great, with steady decline in the rate of interest, and in the power 
of the capitalist to control the laborer's movements ; freedom, wealth, 
power, and civilization, moral, and intellectual, always growing with the 
growth of power to place the societary plates — producers and consumers 
— in close relation with each other, and thus to increase the rapidity 
of the societary circulation. 

That the wonderful activity of that circulation did not result from 
governmental necessities will be clear to all who carefully reflect on the 
facts above presented. Whence, then, came it ? From the re-adoption 



20 

by the people of the Free States of the ideas, that exercise of the co- 
ordinating power was first among the duties of the government ; that 
the produce of the farm ought no longer to be compelled to remain inert 
and losing interest while waiting demand in distant markets ; that the 
capital which daily took the form of labor power ought no longer be 
allowed to go to waste ; that the fuel which underlaid the soil ought no 
longer to remain to be a mere support for foreign rails; that the power 
which lay then petrified in the form of coal ought everywhere to be brought 
to aid the human arm ; that the vast deposits of iron ore should be 
made to take the forms of engines and other machinery to be used sa 
substitutes for mere muscular force; and that all their wonderful re- 
sources, material and moral, ought and must be at once developed. Such 
was the intent and meaning of the nation when the Morrill Tariff, on 
the memorable 2d of March, 18G1, became the law of the land. To that 
law, aided as it was by the admirable action of the Treasury in supplying 
machinery of circulation, does the world stand now indebted for the fact 
that the people of America, in the short space of five years, and at a 
cost of thousands of millions of dollars, were enabled to retrieve the 
downward steps of more than twenty years ; to establish freedom through- 
out the land ; and to save from destruction a nation of more than 
30,000,000 that, by long practice on the pernicious doctrine of laissez- 
faire, had been brought so near the verge of ruin that its escape there- 
from constitutes now the most remarkable event in the history of the 
world. 

Adding the capital that was only paralyzed to that which was abso- 
lutely wasted in 1 lie presidential period that preceded the war, we obtain 
an amount thrice greater than would, had it been so applied, have built 
and stocked as many mills as are in all Great Britain employed in the 
conversion of wool and cotton into cloth ; as many furnaces as there are 
occupied in converting coal and ore into lead, copper, and iron ; and as 
many mills as are now engaged in producing bars; to sink as many 
shafts as would have been required for giving to human labor all the 
aid that there is seen to result from a consumption of coal said to 
furnish power to an extent equivalent to that of six hundred millions of 
men ; and to double the quantity and money value of production, to the 
great advantage of all, borrowers and lenders, employers and workmen, 
traders and manufacturers, builders of railroads and owners of ships, 
there being a perfect harmony of all real and permanent interests. A 
part, and but a small part, of that capital was, by means of a National 
Free Trade System, then saved ; and it was out of the saving that thus 
was brought about that the country was enabled to give to the great 
work above referred to labor and commodities equal in their annual 
money value to the vast sum of $1,000,000,000. 

Was that, however, all it gave ? That such was not the case is proved 
by the extraordinary voluntary contributions that throughout the whole 
period were made of time, mind, and material means for promotion of 
the comfort of those who were in the field, as well as of those whom they 
left behind — contributions that are as little to be paralleled as is the 
magnitude of the work then needed to be performed. The more that 
this history shall come to be studied the more will the student be led to 
the belief that moral as well as material force constitutes capital ; that 



21 

both grow with growth in the rapidity of circulation ; and that growth 
in this latter is wholly dependeut upon discreet exercise of the power 
granted by the people for so directing the societary movement as gradu- 
ally to remove the many obstacles standing in the way of perfect associa- 
tion and combination. 

Among the most remarkable facts of the decade may here be mentioned 
the admirable conduct of millions of negro men suddenly set free, and the 
equally admirable conduct of a single American citizen in donating many 
millions to be applied to their education, and to various other benevolent 
purposes in both Great Britain and the United States. 

Since the close of the war the Union has been unfortunate in having 
for its Finance Minister a man who has profited little by the experience 
of the past few years, and now appears to think that the shortest way 
to extinction of the national debt is to be found in stoppage of the 
societary circulation. As a consequence, all that has been gained during 
the war is being lost in time of peace. To what extent the losses are 
to be carried, or how long this system is to be endured, none now can 
venture to predict. 

§ 9. Annihilating at a single blow the local institutions of France, 
the Revolution gave to the world, in lieu of the historic names of Bur- 
gundy and Brittany, Anjou and Languedoc, those of Cantal, Doubs, 
Lot, and eighty others, none of which in any manner connected their 
people or themselves with the eventful past. Pays d'Etat and Pays 
cVElection alike disappeared, and with them all the local life that had 
resulted from local exercise of power in reference to social action of 
high importance.* Paris, thenceforth, was to issue the decrees in 
virtue of which schoolhouses might be built, or roads constructed, and 
Prefets sent therefrom would see to their execution. Since then, the 
general tendency has been in the same direction — that of political cen- 
tralization ; but, as at no period has it been so decided as since the 
establishment of the second empire, advantage may here be gained from 
studying the course of things in the last decade with a view to see how 
far it tends towards establishing the accuracy of Mirabeau's idea, that 
" Capitals were necessities," but that " if the head were allowed to grow 
too large, the body would become apoplectic and waste away " — one 
of the most important that could at the present time be offered for 
both European and American consideration. Should the facts now to 
be presented tend towards proving its perfect truth, then may we find 
therein an explanation of the causes to which must be attributed the 
remarkable change that so recently has occurred in reference to the place 
occupied by France in the eyes of Europe, if not even in those of the 
world at large. 

Wars, causing large expenditures, are centralizing in their tendencies. 
Since the creation of the second empire, the moneys paid annually into 
the Treasury at Paris, to be thence distributed, have increased in amount 
more than $60,000,000, while interest on the debt has increased about 
$22,000,000, indicating an enlargement of the principal to the extent of 
probably $550,000,000, such being the natural products of the numerous 

* See Principles of Social Science, vol. iii. p. 227. 



22 

wars, Crimean, Chinese, Cochin Chinese, Italian, and Mexican, in which 
the empire has been so steadily engaged. 

Looking always outward, the empire has been steadily engaged in 
efforts at increasing external commerce, sometimes by enlargement of 
its remote possessions, at others by means of foreign treaties, and thus 
following in the footsteps of its British neighbor. When, however, we 
look to the arrangements for promoting internal commerce and thus 
giving life to the various local centres, we are met at once by the fact 
that France, the country that, with Belgium, constitutes the great high- 
way of the world, with a population of 38, 000, 000, a territory containing 
200,000 square miles, an army of 600,000 men, a fleet that costs little 
less than $50,000,000, and a taxation yielding $350,000,000 annually, 
has but 8000 miles of railroad, a quantity little greater than is now 
possessed by the three adjoining States of Pennsylvania, New York, and 
New Jersey, with a population of 8,000,000, and a territory of 100,000 
square miles.* 

* The following passage from a recent speech in the Corps Legislatif exhibits 
the effects of the system above described : — " Farmers had. been recommended 
to raise less corn, to form pasture lands. That advice was very easy to give; 
but to put it in practice resources were required which agriculture could not 
always command. What, then, were the remedies to be applied to the suffer- 
ings and embarrassments of agriculture ? Nobody wished to see the price of 
bread raised ; the duty of the farmer was to produce as much corn as possible 
at the lowest possible price. But to contend with foreign competition the exist- 
ing legislation would require to be modified. All the great works promised by 
the Emperor should be executed without loss of time, whether relating to the 
canals, railways, rivers, or vicinal and departmental roads. The water courses 
were also in a very deplorable state. Boats coming from the sea, and only 
drawing a yard of water, were unable last summer to ascend to Paris ; and the 
canals opening into the Seine were in a similar condition. The works to be 
executed to improve the navigation of the Seine between Paris and the sea 
would cost six millions, but they would produce a saving in the price of trans- 
port of seven millions a year. The same may be said of other rivers. The 
government should modify its system of public works by concentrating them on 
five or six principal routes ; the navigation of the great streams should be first 
attended to ; then the canals, and those improvements should be executed, not 
simultaneously, but one at a time, so that the sums expended might be rendered 
productive at once. (Hear, hear.) Agriculture should be relieved of some of 
the heavy imposts with which it is burthened. When the great economic 
reform was carried out, customs duties which weighed on industry were sacri- 
ficed to the amount of a hundred millions. Agriculture has, nevertheless, the 
same right to relief as manufactures. (Assent.) When the enterprises in 
which the country is engaged are brought to a close the surpluses should be 
applied to the amount of fifty millions or more to remove some of the burthens 
from the farmer. The land tax and registration dues paid by the rural districts 
amount to about four hundred millions. But while awaiting a reduction in 
the charges, an equality between foreign and French corn may be established 
by imposing a duty of two francs per hectolitre on the former, for before a hec- 
tolitre of French produce has left the farm it has paid at least two francs of 
taxes. Agricultural credit must also be established on new bases. The govern- 
ment has, indeed, made several attempts to do so, among others that of the foun- 
dation of the Credit Foncier Company, which has lent a great deal of money to 
the towns, but has rendered but slight services to the growers. A drainage 
fund was also established, and the Legislative Body voted a sum of one hundred 
millions, but not more than one million three hundred thousand or one million 
four hundred thousand francs have been lent to agriculture." The direct effect 



23 

Examining these latter, we see how ill they are even yet provided with 
the means of local communication, and to how great an extent their 
existing roads have been constructed with exclusive reference to outside 
commerce. Such being the case, how obvious and excessive becomes the 
French deficiency when we find that, as compared with the territory of 
the great highway of the world, their needs are, even now, better sup- 
plied in the ratio of two to one, and as compared with population that 
of almost five to one. 

New England, not a highway for any portion whatsoever of the exte- 
rior world, but possessing a large internal commerce, has 1000 miles of 
railroad for every million of her population, whereas France has little 
more than 1000 for every 5,000,000. In the one, local life and activity 
increase with a rapidity nowhere else exceeded. In the other, the reverse 
effect is from year to year being more and more produced, the attractions 
of the capital steadily increasing, while those of minor towns and cities 
as steadily decline.* 

Railroads are necessarily centralizing in their tendencies, but when 
to this is added, that the Imperial Government has been, and perhaps 
still is, engaged in transferring to the capital the monuments and records 
of the past, and thus diminishing the attraction of local centres, while 
incessantly engaged in enlarging and beautifying Paris, and thereby 
making it more and more desirable as a place of residence, the cause of 
the general lifelessness of local centres throughout the empire may 
readily be understood. 

Why, however, is it, the local roads remain unmade ? That it was 
otherwise before the revolution in the provinces which were then allowed 
the exercise of power for self-government, is seen in the answer to the 
king, made by the States of Languedoc, to the effect that they needed 
no aid from government for the completion or maintenance of any 
works of public utility whatsoever, feeling themselves perfectly com- 
petent for doing all the work required to be done.f Then, however, 
those people exercised a Will of their own. Now, they are subjected to 
that of men whose homes are found in the great central city, and who, 
while ever ready to aid in the construction of roads leading to and from 
it, feel but little interest in the cross-roads required for giving life to the 
smaller towns and cities, and thus bringing into closer connection the 
many millions of positives and negatives — producers and consumers, lend- 

of the extremely imperfect system of internal communications is to prevent the 
people of Northern France from supplying the South with food, and the indirect 
one that of compelling its export to England, and thus reducing the price in 
the regulating market of the world. The two chief trading nations of the world 
are thus united in the effort to depress the prices of food and raw materials of 
every kind. 

* " What can induce you to stop at Dijon ?" Such was the question addressed 
to the author by an eminent French economist, after hearing that he proposed 
to spend a day in that city which for centuries had been the splendid capital of 
the Burgundian dukes, and as such the centre of power and rival of Paris for 
capital of the kingdom ! There are fifty towns and cities in Greruiany in regard 
to which no German would think of putting such a question. In France, out- 
side of the few trading cities, there is scarcely even a single one. 

f De Tocqueville. JUAncien Re/jime. Appendix. 



24 

ers and borrowers — of which the population of the empire, outside of a 
very few principal cities, now stands composed. 

Prior to the revolution of 1848, the lenders and borrowers of various 
cities and towns, after overcoming many obstructions, had been enabled 
to come together for the formation of banks of discount and deposit. At 
that date, however, centralization triumphed, all local banks being then 
closed, and the power for corporate banking, as well as for the issue of 
circulating notes, being limited to the Parisian stockholders who own 
the few millions constituting the capital of the Bank of France. Finan- 
cial and political centralization have thus gone hand in hand together. 

. In the decade ending 1861 the total increase of numbers was 930,000, 
of which no less than 531,000 were found in Paris alone, while of the 
small remainder the greater part were found in Bordeaux, Marseilles, 
and other principal cities. Iu all of them air and light are scarce, the 
proportion borne in Paris by population to space, as stated by Mons. 
Duval in his Reflections on the Census of 1866,* being nearly thrice 
greater than is the case even in London, and yet greater in the others. 
Such, says Mons. Duval, are the results of frecpient wars, and of the 
are of taxation. f 

As a consequence of all this it is, that population now grows so 
slowly that two hundred years would be required for its duplication. 
How far this tends to affect the position of France as regards other 
powers is shown in the fact, that while the number of young men annually 
attaining the age required for military service is stated at only 315,000, 
that of the newly-formed German empire is no less than 383,000, the 
tendency towards profitable connection of agricultural and mechanical 
pursuits being, in this latter, more complete, and the supply of light and 
air, therefore, more abundant. | 

Throughout the physical world the more rapid the motion, the 
greater is the force. So, too, is it in the social world. Centralization, 
tending as it does towards wider separation of the societary positives and 
negatives, tends necessarily to arrest of the one and destruction of the 
other. At no period has the tendency in that direction been so great 
as in the years of the second empire ; and if we now see that France is 
gradually losing the position she so long had held, we may find in it con- 
firmation of the predictions of Mirabeau as to the injury that must 
inevitably result from " drawing all the talent of the kingdom to Paris, 
and leaving to the provincials no chance of reward or motive of am- 
bition," thereby placing them "in a state of dependence" and converting 
them " into an inferior class of citizens."§ 

Such is the present tendency of imperial action. Let it be continued, 
and it will become safe to predict that France will never regain that 
influence over European thought and action she so long had exercised. 

* Republished in the Zeitsclirifl of the Prussian Statistical Bureau, 1866, p. 128. 

f In the five years ending 1866, the increase was 680,000, of which a third 
were found in eight principal cities, nearly two-fifths of the departments mean- 
while exhibiting a decrease of numbers. The ratio of increase in less than a 
third of one per cent, per annum, or one-ninth of that of the American Union. 

X For the better course of things in Central Europe generally, see Le Plat, 
La Reforme Sociale, vol. i. p. 430. 

§ Quoted by De Tocqueville, L 'Ancien R<<ylme, chap. vi. 



25 

§ 10. The onward progress of Russia, as a consequence of measures 
tending towards bringing together the producers and consumers of the 
empire is exhibited, in this last decade, in the great measure of emanci- 
pation so happily effected. 

Turkey, on the contrary, steadily adhering to the policy which looks 
to perpetuation of the farmer's dependence on foreign markets, and to 
increase of the taxation of trade and transportation, has steadily de- 
clined, the "sick man" passing slowly forward toward the grave, doing 
this, too, in despite of numerous proclamations of changes in the con- 
stitution, each of which, in succession, as the world has been assured, was 
to produce effects so important as to insure revivification of the empire. 

Little more than a dozen years since France and England, the two 
leading nations of Europe, formed an alliance having for its object the 
defence of Turkey against Russia, and the continued maintenance of 
the former in its then existing condition of subjection to the will of 
foreign traders. That subjection has been continued, and, as a necessary 
consequence, Turkey has become greatly weaker while Russia has become 
as greatly strengthened. In this state of things the former is again 
menaced by the latter, but, as her allies have no desire to repeat the 
lesson of 1854, she seems destined now to find that not a single 
stranger gun will be fired in her defence, and thus to give to the world 
further evidence of the fact that the man, or the nation, who would com- 
mand the aid of others, must show by proper management of his own 
proper household that his need of help is likely to be a declining, and not 
an increasing, one. Such, even in Turkey, would speedily be the case 
could those who are charged with the management of affairs be made 
properly to appreciate the idea that strength and power grow with 
growth in the rapidity of circulation, and that the circulation becomes 
more rapid as the positives and negatives of society are brought into 
closer relation with each other.* 

§11. Turning now to the British dependencies, we find in Canada, as 
has above been shown in Turkey, efforts at the correction of economical 

* For the maintenance of anarchy throughout this unfortunate empire the 
ruling powers of Europe require that their consuls shall be invested with autho- 
rity in reference to all cases in which their subjects may be interested. What 
is the effect of this imperium in imperio, and what the character of the magis- 
tracy thus created, are thus shown in a recent work entitled The East and the 
West, a series of papers edited by the Hon. Henry Stanley, a gentleman closely 
allied to distinguished members of the late Administration, and one whose long 
residence, in official capacities, in Greece and Turkey had fully qualified him 
properly to appreciate the atrocities perpetually practised upon the people of 
the East whom it pleases those of the West to treat as mere barbarians. 

"What is, moreover, the machinery actually at work, for carrying out the 
obligations of these treaties ? Consuls having the power of magistrates, but 
without legal training or social status, with no police to speak of to carry out 
their orders, or to cause them to be respected. The Consuls themselves are 
either traders or adventurers, or persons who have failed in other professions. 
In the Levant many Consuls are pluralists — that is, they represent, in their 
own persons, several Powers. On official reception-days, such a Consul pays 
several visits successively to the Governor, merely going out of the room to 
change his decorations, and having himself again announced as Consul of 
another country : such an official is uamed in Levantine French, ' Un Consul 
de plusieurs potences.' " 



26 

error by frequent change in political forms ; but here, as there, wholly 
unsuccessful. Attributing former difficulties to political separation, the 
upper and lower provinces were thrown together, but with so small 
effect that, notwithstanding the great abundance of rich and unoccupied 
territory, the past few years have placed in strong relief the fact, that not 
only can the province not secure the many settlers who come by the St. 
Lawrence, but that it cannot eveu retain its native population. Repe- 
tition of old troubles requiring repetition of remedies we have just now a 
further political change, leaving wholly out of view the great economical 
one needed for bringing into close connection the producers and con- 
sumers of the country, as, to a certain extent, has been done in the ad- 
joining more attractive States. When that course shall have been 
adopted; when Canada, passing from a state of dependence, shall begin 
to have a will of her own ; when the present stagnation shall have given 
way to that activity which always follows in the train of rapid circula- 
tion amongst the societary positives and negatives; then, but uot till 
then, will she have the force required for freeing herself from the hu- 
miliating necessity for asking parliamentary guarantees of loans to be 
created for the purpose of further facilitating export of the soil in the 
form of agricultural products of the rudest kind. Then, and not till 
then, will she begin properly to appreciate the fact that the raising of raw 
materials for foreign markets is the proper work of the barbarian and 
the slave, and of them alone. 

Passing now to Jamaica, we find the decade to have furnished new 
evidence of the great truth, that freedom proclaimed by law is of small 
avail when unaccompanied by measures tending toward production of 
that diversification of pursuits which results from bringing producers and 
consumers into close relation with each other. Thirty years since the 
colored people of the island were declared to have been emancipated, yet 
has civilization made but little progress with either blacks or whites. 
For this the reason mainly is, that so adverse is British policy to any 
measures tending to the production of real freedom, that up to a recent 
period, as it yet may be, such were the arrangements of the British reve- 
nue system that the poor producers found themselves wholly deprived of 
power for so far diversifying their employments as even to be enabled to 
subject their own sugar to the first and simplest processes of refinement. 
The result exhibits itself in the fact, that oppressiou has recently been 
followed by an insurrection in the suppression of which there have been 
perpetrated "cruelties of which," says the London Times, "it is impos- 
sible to speak without shuddering."* Such occurrences strike un- 

* " It is now certain that scores, and perhaps hundreds, of prisoners were 
flogged before being hung, and often before being tried. It is certain that some, 
though it is uncertain how many, were compelled to run the gauntlet, after 
being flogged, through a crowd of brutal spectators, who were allowed to insult 
them or pelt them as they pleased. It is certain that several, at least, were 
shot or hung without the pretence of a trial, at the caprice of an officer or sub- 
ordinate. It is certain that Mr. Ramsay, the Provost Marshal, stands charged 
by a multitude of witnesses, black and white, with excesses for which a parallel 
must be sought among the infamous eccentricities of Oriental despots. It is 
certain, at least — for the statement rests on the authority of the resident magis- 
trate at Path — that he flogged with his own hand fifteen men who had never 
been sentenced, and were to be sent before the court-martial at Morant Pay. 



27 

pleasantly of course, for the moment, upon the British mind, but they are 
then again forgotten, only to be revived on the occurrence of some new 
atrocity, proper study of which could scarcely fail to satisfy every man 
sound in mind and heart that the system which looks towards making 
Britain " the workshop of the world," is, of all the forms of tyranny ever 
devised, the one that, par excellence, tends to the establishment of 
slavery as the normal condition of the man who needs to work, and to 
the destruction of all moral feeling among those by whom the workers 
are employed. Should this be doubted, they would find evidence thereof 
that might tend to satisfy them, by turning to Lady Duff Gordon's 
charming little book on Egypt and there seeing the effect produced on a 
high-minded and admirable woman by the conduct of her countrymen 
towards the Arabs, as preparation for treatment of the poor Hindoos 
over whom they were so soon to exercise their powers of government.* 
Had Lady Gordon written a little later she might have added, in a 
note, that the question of woman-flogging in Jamaica, by officers and 
gentlemen bearing commissions in the British service, had been set at 
rest by the admission of Captain Hole, of the 6th Foot, that he had 
ordered women to be flogged by the soldiers under his command, and 
had stood by to see it done. 

Boasting of British freedom, but in Egypt holding that " nothing 
can be done without forced labor" — their fellow-countrymen meanwhile 
clinging to human slavery in America as the only course by means of 
which to secure abuudant supplies of cheap cotton — these men arrive in 
India, fully prepared for participation in the work of civilizing* people 
of whom, at an earlier period, Sir Thomas Munro, perhaps the highest 
Indian authority, emphatically declared, that in regard to all the essen- 
tial characteristics of civilization they " were not inferior to any civilized 
people in Europe." What is their general course of action towards the 
impoverished people by whom they find themselves at once surrounded, 
is thus described, in a speech in Parliament, by Earl Russell : 

"That very morning he had received a long letter from Sir F. Bruce, lament- 
ing the insolence and disregard of Chinese customs and feelings, which were 
exhibited by Englishmen in that country. He lamented their want of courtesy, 
and improper behavior to the Chinese, whom they regarded as an inferior race. 
He (Earl Russell) was afraid the same was the case in Japan. But conduct of 
that kiud was not exhibited to the Chinese and Japanese alone ; for he found, 



It is probable, moreover, that men were bribed with the hope of life — a hope not 
always realized — to betray their accomplices ; that persons accused of crimes 
were refused permission to call witnesses in their defence, and that some were 
executed, the only proof of whose guilt was their being found wounded. These 
are things which cannot be dismissed with common-places about the dire ne- 
cessities of war, and the unfairness of scrutinizing retrospectively through a 
microscope the proceedings of men confronted with an overwhelming danger. 
They are acts, not military, but judicial, done for the most part after armed 
resistance had ceased, and when there was nothing to prevent a deliberate 
separation of the innocent from the guilty." — Times. 

* " What chokes me is to hear Englishmen talk of the stick as being the only 
way to manage Arabs." — Letters from Egypt, 1863—135, p. 105. 

" It is really heart-breaking to see what we are sending to India now. The 
mail days are dreaded. We never know when some brutal outrage may excite 
' Mussulman fanaticism.' They try their hands on the Arabs in order to be in 
good train for insulting the Hindoos." — Ibid., p. 309. 



23 

in a book recently published, that the same kind of conduct was practised 
towards the Indian race. He could not but lament that more courteous conduct 
was not shown by our countrymen, and that they did not pay more regard to 
the habits and customs of people, whom they were pleased to regard as a race 
inferior to their own."* 

To those familiar with statements in regard to India similar to those 
here referred to by Lord Russell, that at various times have appeared in 
British journals, the occurrence of the great event in Indian history of 
the last decade, must have afforded as little cause for surprise as did the 
horrible circumstances which followed the suppression of the rebellion, 
thus described in a recent article (January, 1867) of the Westminster 
Review: 

" A historian of some promise has said that he knows nothing in early 
English history, except William's devastation of the North, that approaches 
the horrors that our troops have committed in putting down the Indian revolt, 
a judgment that appears to be confirmed by Captain Trotter's statement, p. 284, 
when, speaking of Lord Canning's clemency, he says : 

" • When the gallows, the cat, the torch, were threatening to blot out the last 
distinctions between guilt and innocence, to turn whole districts into grave- 
yards, deserts, haunts of beggared or fear-stricken outcasts, it was time for some 
voice of power to cry out upon the folly, the savage meanness, of overdone re- 
venixe. In thirteen days alone of June and July, one commissioner had sent to 
the gibbet forty-two wretches guilty, all save one murderer, of nothing worse 
than robbery, rioting, or rebellion. Some of them paid with their lives for 
having goods or money — even bags of copper half-pice — about which they 
failed to give any plausible account. In less than six weeks up to the 1st of 
August, some hundred and twenty men, of whom none were Sepoys, and only 
a few were of higher rank than villagers, servants, policemen, had been hanged 
by the civil commissioners of one county alone. Of course, in many cases, the 
evidence against the prisoners seemed strong only to minds that saw all objects 
through a film of blood. 0/ the numbers arrested, not one in ten appears to have 
escaped somt form of punishment, not two to have escaped the gallows.^ 

"This is the way in which Englishmen sometimes recommend their civiliza- 
tion and illustrate their Christianity in British dependencies, not without sym- 
pathetic applause from excitable compatriots at home." 

The picture here presented would be more complete had it been 
accompanied by an estimate of the value of the booty obtained in Hindoo 
cities, together with a list of the chief officers who participated in 
division of the spoil. 

Of all men the thorough trader, whether in slaves or merchandise, is 
most merciless. Of all pursuits there is none so well calculated to deaden, 
if not utterly to destroy, all the best feelings of the human heart as is a 
thorough devotion to trade; and yet, when seeking a definition of 
political economy, we turn to the most recent work of an eminent French 
economist, we find it there described as being the science which treats 
only of buying and selling, or in other words, of Trade ! 

But a few years previous to the occurrence of the Indian rebellion 
there occurred in Denmark a very serious one, the suppression of which 
was followed by no occurrence prejudicial to either the life or the limb 
of any of the parties who had been engaged therein. Since then there 
has occurred on this Western continent the greatest rebellion on record, 

* The East and the West ; or, our Dealings with our Neighbors. Edited by 
the Hon. H. Stanley. Loudon, 1866. 



29 

yet has the last State prisoner been but now discharged and left to wan- 
der throughout the world at his own perfect pleasure. The reader who 
may now compare American conduct towards Jefferson Davis with the 
British treatment of the unfortunate Nena Sahib, hunted as he was like a 
wild beast, may be led, perhaps, to doubt the civilizing tendencies, whether 
as regards the foreign master or the native slave, of a system which 
leads its advocates to talk to the poor Hindoo of a religion whose base 
is found in the grand idea of doing to others as they would that others 
should do to them, while tendering with one hand the piece of shoddy 
cloth, and directing with the other the bayonet required for retaining in 
"festering and compulsory idleness" the "vast heaps of humanity that 
now encumber the soil of Iudia,"* and that should be employed in con- 
verting wool into cloth. 

Shortly previous to the rebellion the post of Finance Minister of 
India was tendered to Mr. Wilson, long editor of the Economist, and 
by him accepted. Thorough free trader as he had always been, but 
little study on the spot was required for satisfying him that a change of 
policy had become entirely indispensable, and for leading him to the 
adoption of measures tending towards protection of the yet remaining 
manufactures of that magnificent but impoverished country. For this 
he and the new policy were forthwith denounced in the most unmeasured 
terms, and such pressure was brought to bear upon the Indian govern- 
ment as to forbid continuance of the trivial protection that had been 
allowed. Since then, India has profited largely by diminution of the 
supplies of American cotton, yet has the world been now again com- 
pelled to read of famines, of destruction of life, of general demoralization, 
such as flow necessarily from a system that looks to compelling the poor 
cultivator to exhaust his land by sending its produce, in its rudest state, 
to foreign markets, and such as are here described : — 

" The crop fails again, and the peasant sees that it is death instead of ruin 
which now threatens him. Rice is unprocurable within a hundred miles, and 
would cost him a shilling a pound to bring it into his village. The cattle are 
killed, but not eaten ; the seed-corn is consumed ; the family is reduced to a 
few potatoes, or jungle berries, or fish, and of these eats only once in two days. 
The children die one by one, the weakest first, and then the aged, and the 
women — kinsfolk, wives, sisters, dropping daily, till the few who are permitted 
by Hindooism to bury the dead are overtaxed, and life seems to each man ended 
for him. Then the men give way slowly ; they have been starving quietly for 
months, till they are worn to that horrible aspect which Sir S. Barker has 
sketched in one of his chapters, an aspect under which human beings look like 
enlarged spiders, and men have no calves and no thighs, and no flesh whatever 
on the head, and no strength even for the commonest household duties. * * * 
* * There is no rich man, the absence of a perpetual settlement prohibiting 
agricultural wealth, the nearest European is forty or fifty miles away, and the 



* Chapman. Cotton and Commerce of India. 

"The missionary has lately entered into such close partnership with the 
trader that the people of the countries they wish to ' open up' must be in doubt 
whether it is our Bibles or our broadcloth, our cotton or our Christianity that 
we most desire to force upon them, and the attempt to compel them to accept a 
spurious Christianity and shoddy manufactures by means of bayonets and can- 
non is not likely to be permanently successful." — Free Press, London, April, 
1866. 



30 

solitary hope is the far-off and impersonal "Shirkar," the State. If that does 
not help, the village perishes. This has heen the scene repeated for five mouths 
in all the villages of Orissa, of a province that is of the area of England and 
Wales, with a population estimated at five millions. Hundreds, it is quite pos- 
sible, thousand'?, of villages have been so situated, have, there seems no reason 
to doubt, so perished, more especially in the hilly and jungle-covered interior. 
Where a town existed the people fled to it, till in Balasore they dropped dead 
of hunger at the rate of 12(i a day, and the magistrate reports that he was com- 
pelled to leave them unburied for three days — equivalent to three weeks in 
England — for there were not enough of low caste men to bury. The European 
assistants found the dead all along the roads with the dogs feeding on their 
bodies. They could do nothing, for money could not purchase food; they them- 
selves were importing bread frcja Calcutta, and rice could only be shipped in 
sufficient quantities by the State, and even then, the cattle being dead, could 
only be carried into the interior by driblets. Imagining the entire crop to have 
failed twice in Ireland, and the sea closed against imports, we may gain some 
idea — an imperfect one — of the misery spread over Orissa, where, except the 
crop, the people have absolutely nothing, their old salt manufacture having been 
suppressed.'* 

The salt manufacture, one that had endured for ages, had been sup- 
pressed. Why ? That salt might be made scarce, and that the govern- 
ment might be enabled to realize large revenue from the sale of a limited 
quantity of that indispensable article of food ! That its price might lie 
high, and that the product of British mines might be enabled to compete 
in Indian markets with that of Hindoo laborers ! Great was the 
rejoicing in Britain when the salt manufacture was prohibited, and 
when the people of Orissa were thus driven from an industry that, had it 
been maintained, might have sufficed for preventing the immolation of a 
million of its unfortunate inhabitants at the shrine of British free 
trade.* In this manner it is that civilization has been diffused through- 
out British India in the last decade. 

The people of Australia, having found that under the system of 
laisaer /aire the country was rapidly becoming "a huge sheep-walk ;" 
that "their farmers could no longer struggle in the face of discourage- 
ment and disaster ;" that "their youth were growing up in a state of 
semi-barbarism, without education, without employment, and without 
hope for the future ;" that " their manufactories were falling into decay, 
their capital was idle, and the whole body in the saddest state;" deter- 
mined two years since on the adoptiou of measures such as seemed to be 
required for bringing together the societary positives and negatives — 
producers and consumers ; a course of action in which they naturally 
found themselves opposed by all the birds of prey among them — all 
those who profited by means of buying wool cheap and selling dear the 
cloth the shepherds needed. 

"What has thus far been the result of this change of policy we are not 
advised, but the mere fact that the people are so far awake that a large 

* The report of the Famine Commission of India is severe in its condemna- 
tion of the Board of Revenue. The Commissioners estimate the mortality in 
Orissa and Midnapore as certainly not less than one-fourth of the whole popula- 
tion, but state that they have no trustworthy statistics of the whole population 
of the province. The statistics vary from three and a half to five millions, 
which would make the mortality from three-fourths of a million to a million 
and a half, in an area of twenty-eight thousand seven hundred and thirty-six 
square miles, or half that of England and Wales. 



31 

majority lias already pronounced in its favor furnishes evidence that the 
day cannot be now far distant when Australia must decide on having a 
Will of its own, and thus bring to a close its dependence on distant men 
who, desiring that the Australian farmer may obtain the smallest price 
for the things he needs to sell, and pay the largest for those he needs to 
buy, seek by all the means in their power to promote increase of com- 
petition for the sale of wool and for the purchase of cloth. 

Such is the sad condition of the several principal dependencies of 
Britain at the close of the second decade of a system that was, as we were 
assured, destined to bring about " the moral regeneration of the world."* 
How it is with the Central Power itself we may now inquire. 

§ 12. Turning now to the United Kingdom, we find the last dozen 
years to have presented to view wars with both Russia and China, a 
rebellion in India, a war in the South Pacific, an insurrection in Jamaica, 
and one at home, this last having occurred in that only portion of the 
civilized world in which a nation has been seen to be steadily passing 
out of existence without the aid of either guns or gunpowder, a sacrifice 
on the altar of trade. 

The same period has furnished two monetary crises, both so severe as 
to have compelled the Bank to place itself in a situation to require abso- 
lution at the hands of Parliament. Add to them two periods of paralysis 
following these crises — a cotton famine that brought to the verge of 
starvation tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of poor working-people — 
a pauperism that now numbers in England and Wales alone, a million 
of subjects - ]" — and a public expenditure that has grown from little more 
than fifty to seventy millions^ — and we have the chief occurrences of 
little more than the second decade of a system that was, as we were 
confidently assured, to give to the laborer happiness and comfort, to the 
society a steadiness of action and an economy of administration such as 
thus far had not been known, and to the world at large universal peace. 

The more continuous and steady the action of an engine the greater 
is the force obtained, and the more the reason to expect continuance of 
its profitable existence. In the case of the societary machine every step 
towards proper co-ordination of its various parts — consumers and pro- 
ducers, borrowers and lenders — tends towards acceleration of motion and 
increase of the force obtained ; towards equality of fortune and of rights ; 
towards development of the individualities of each and all, with grow- 
ing power of self-government, and growing sense of accountability here 
and hereafter, freedom and responsibility going always hand in hand 
together, and the machine itself tending more and more to assume the 
form that assures its permanence. § Wars, crises, strikes, lock outs, 
and all other causes of unsteadiness in the societary action, tend to pro- 
duce precisely the reverse effects, fortunes becoming more and more 
unequal, and the land more and more monopolized, a state of things that 
was well exhibited half a century since when, at the close of the great 

* Dunckley. Charter of the Nations, p. 413. 

f January 1, 1854, the number of paupers in receipt of relief was only 
818,822. 

X The total expenditure for the year ending January 5, 1854, was but 
£51,174,839. 

§ See chap, xxii., section 8. 



32 

French war, rapid changes of political and financial position so greatly 
increased the power of the already rich to become possessors of the pro- 
perties of thousands of small proprietors to whom those changes had 
brought entire ruin. Even then, however, there yet remained a fourth, 
if not even a third, of the 200,000 proprietors of the days of Adam 
Smith ; but so great have been since the changes, and so unsteady the 
societary movement, that progress has been steadily made in a false 
direction, and to so great extent as to have warranted Mr. Bright in 
saying that one-half of England and Wales was then, a year since, 
owned by 150 persons, while of the land of Scotland a half was held by 
ten or a dozen persons. In the former, the whole number of proprietors, 
large and small, has sunk to 30,000, or less than a sixth of what it had 
been a century since. 

With every step in that direction the place of the small proprietor, so 
much regarded and respected by Adam Smith, comes to be filled by the 
day laborer entitled to claim of the landlord, or his tenant, little beyond 
the minimum of food required for support of life.* With each there is 
increased tendency towards total separation of the laborer from the laud. 
By the last census there was shown, in 821 parishes, a diminution in the 
number of houses to an extent exceeding 3000, the number of persons to 
be accommodated having meanwhile become 16,000 greater. As a con- 
sequence of this it is, that recent parliamentary reports exhibit a state 
of things so frightful as regards drainage, ventilation, the crowding of 
large families into single rooms, and the fearful immorality thence re- 
sulting, not oidy fully confirming the views presented in the body of this 
work, but actually going ahead of them and thus presenting a condition 
of manners and morals utterly disgraceful to any country claiming to rank 
as civilized. 

" The order of the peasantry, a country's pride," says D'Israeli, " has 
vanished from the face of the land." Seeking their descendants we find 
them in receipt of from two to four dollars a week, a part of which goes 
for rent of a miserable dwelling, | the wife meantime earuing sixpence 

* In connection with the theory of Mr. Ruskin and some English political 
economists, that a British laborer is entitled to wages which will support him, 
and that the value of a day's labor is at least what a day's food and a night's 
lodging cost, the English estimate of how much, or rather how little, food and 
money will support human life in that country is curious. The Fen district 
laborers, for instance, get from six to fifteen pence per day, and as they gene- 
rally sleep in barns, or under ricks and hedges, and have no lodging to pay for, 
and wear no clothes " to speak of," and are mostly young and not over healthy 
people, with limited appetites, their small earnings are supposed to be sufficient 
to buy their daily food. Respectable farni-laborers with families are presumed 
to be well paid at from six to twenty shillings a week for their labor, and they 
live on these small wages. — Evening Post. 

t " The customary rate of wages in the South of England is from eight to 
nine shillings, two dollars to two dollars and twenty-five cents, subject to a 
deduction of one shilling or twenty-five cents per week for the rent of a cottage, 
where that luxury is indulged in. It is common for cottagers to have an allot- 
ment of land, which they cultivate for themselves in evening hours, and for 
which they pay rent at the rate of about three dollars per half acre yearly, the 
crop being worth about ten dollars above the rent, if the man takes time enough 
out of his hours of rest to cultivate it thoroughly. The laborer furnishes his 
own tools, which cost him at least one dollar and seventy-five cents yearly. 
Men also earn about twenty dollars additional for piece-work during harvest. 



33 

a day by working in the fields, and the children, by thousands, making 
part of " gangs" such as are here described :— 

" The gang system," as recently exhibited in Parliament, "in brief is this- 
In the Fen districts, covering nearly a million of acres of the richest land in 
England, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire, Norfolk Suffolk 
and m parts of the counties of Northampton, Bedford, and Rutland, about seven 
thousand children, from five years of age and upwards, besides persons of both 
sexes of from fifteen to eighteen years of age— are employed in gangs numbering 
from fifteen to twenty laborers in each gang, under a master, and in a condition 
differing from slavery only because it is infinitely worse. 

" The gang-master is almost invariably a dissolute man, who cannot get 
steady employment as a laborer with any decent farmer. In most instances he 
actually purchases the labor of the children from poor parents ; he sells this 
labor to farmers, pays the gang what he pleases, and puts the profit in his 
pocket. For seven or eight months in the year these gangs are driven, often 
seven or eight miles a day, to farms where they work at planting, weeding 
picking, stone-gathering, and like labor, from half-past five in the morning to 
seven or eight o'clock in the evening. The gang-master is paid by the day or 
by the acre; and he pays the little children from fourpence to sixpence per dav 
while the older lads and girls receive from nine to fifteen pence. The master' 
for driving his hands to the field and for keeping them up to their work, which 
he does with a stick, makes an estimated profit of a pound sterling or there- 
abouts, a week. & 

''There is testimony to show that hundreds of the younger children are car- 
ried home m the a.ms of the older lads every night. From working breast-hMi 
in wet grain many of the children are crippled for life by rheumatism, while 
others contract the seeds of ague, pleurisy, and consumption. Cases are given 
where little girls, four years old, have been driven through these long, terrible 
days of work. The most pathetic pictures presented by Mr. Wilberforce of 
colonial slave-driving forty years ago, make the British West Indies seem 
almost an Arcadia in comparison with the Fen districts in England to-day. 

"This exhibition, shocking as it is, is by no means the most frightful phase 
of the gang system. The gangs are under no moral restraint whatever. Often- 
times at night both sexes are huddled together in barns, where, among the older 
boys and girls, the most shameful events naturally follow. Clergymen and otl^r 
respectable witnesses testified to the Commission of Inquiry that the gang 
laborers are ' beneath morals.' They have no consciousness of chastity, and do 
not know the meaning of the word. Medical directors of infirmaries state that 
gang girls, as young as thirteen years, have been brought to them to be con- 
fined. Their language and conduct are so depraved that dozens of parish 
clergymen, surgeons, and respectable laboring people, declared to the commission 
that the introduction of any gang labor in any village extinguishes morality." 
— Evening Post. J 

Turning now to Ireland we find the country of "popular famines," 
from which all fly who can find the means for so doing, and from which 
so many did fly in the last decade that the diminution of population was 
nearly 800,000. Of all countries there is none that has been subjected 
to so many experiments, almost all having been already tried except the 
single one which really is needed— that one which has made of the little 

They work during eight months of the year from seven o'clock until five, with 
a half-hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner, making nine and a half hours 
In winter they work from six to five, with one hour for dinner, making ten hours 
of labor. If a pressure of work extends the time of labor an hour or two no 
extra compensation is commonly given beyond an extra mug of ale or cider'" 

Corresponding with this we find, in the Northern portion of the United King- 
dom, a third of the whole population of Scotland living in houses of a single 
room. a 

3 



34 

Belgium one of the most thriving countries of the world* — the bringing 
together of societary positives and negatives, producers and consumers, 
givers and receivers, borrowers and lenders. 

Throughout the United Kingdom the increase of population was, in 
round numbers, 1,500,000, one-third of which was found in and near 
London, and another in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, 
and five other cities; leaving for the kingdom at large but the remaining 
half million. 

In the decade the disproportion of the sexes had much increased, the 
704,000 excess of females of 1851 having grown to 870,000 in 1861, no 
allowance being made in either case for army, navy, or seamen in the 
merchant service. 

Driven from the land, many emigrate, leaving behind those who from 
sex, age, or infirmity of health, are unfitted for the labors of clearing 
and cultivating American or Australian lands. More, however, place 
themselves in that limited portion of Britain in which are found the cities 
of London and Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, transferring to 
property in their vicinities the money value lost by the lands they had 
left. The result exhibits itself in the enormous wealth of ducal owners 
of almost entire counties, and of millionaire proprietors of city lots and 
houses, side by side, as the Times has recently told its readers — 

' ; With crowds of men jostling, striving, almost fighting each other, for admis- 
sion, not to see a favorite actor or hear a popular preacher, or to witness a prize 
fight or rat bait, but to gain the privilege of breaking hard stones, in a cold, 
muddy yard attached to the parish workhouse, for the reward of three-pence 
and a loaf of bread. These men," it adds, " are not clad in the usual stone -yard 
apparel ; they wear good coats — rags are scarcely to be seen. They are men 
who, not very long ago, were earning from $6 to $13 weekly, to whom the very 
mention of the workhouse would have been contamination ; and here they 
struggle and wrestle for its most meagre advantages." Comparisons are added 
of the relief afforded to the poor. "During the winters of 18o'5-(j the average 
daily number of laborers in the Poplar stone-yard, attached to one of the Lou- 
don poor-houses was 200, but in the week ending January 9th, 1867, the daily 
average was over 1000. In the last week of 18t>li, that poor-house gave outdoor 
parochial relief to 4340 persons, as compared with 1974 in the last week of 1865. 
This establishment," it says, " is now giving relief to its utmost capacity, and 
this fact, together with the announcement that nearly all the funds have been 
drawn out of the London savings banks — the working classes having been from 
four to six months without regular wages — shows that at present there is 
greater distress in London than has been known for a long time." 

Turning now to another high authority, the Saturday Review, we 
find the effects of instability thus exhibited : — 

" London Street contains no less than 250 families, no one of which, however 
numerous, occupies, as a rule, more than one room. Father, mother, and, it may 
be, six or seven children, somehow contrive to sleep together in one bed, and, 
in the absence of sheets and blankets, which are being taken care of by the 
pawnbroker, probably find some compensation for the discomfort of overcrowd- 
ing in the luxury of animal warmth — a luxury all the more prized from the 
difficulty, in cold weather, of procuring it anywhere but in bed. The plan is 
cheaper for the moment than either blanket or coals, and unhappily the British 



* " Belgium is Paradise Regained for everybody except the dogs in the carts, 
and even for them the supply of bones is perennial." Fisher. Food Supply of 
Western Europe. London, 18(jb'. 



35 

laborer has yet to learn how much more it costs him in the long run. Enter 
one of these rooms at random, and the chances are that you find it tenanted by 
a dock-yard laborer, who, like the engineer in the Pall Mall Gazette, made quite 
enough to keep himself and family in what they consider comfort until he was 
thrown out of work. Now, all the work he can get is the dignified employment 
for Lord Palmerston's Civis Romarius of oakum picking at the work-house, and 
this procures each hungry child a slice of bread. If the wife is a good needle- 
woman, she can earn 4.]d. a day, by nine hours of shirt making ; so long, that 
is, as her health stands one of the most trying, both mentally and physically, 
of all sedentary occupations. This pays the rent. A family fortunate enough 
to be able thus to provide for bread and shelter, the stoic's two necessaries of 
life, can secure its superfluous luxuries by a little begging, a little borrowing, 
and a good deal of pawning. The wife in that case does not sacrifice more than 
half her petticoats, and the husband is not obliged to be in bed while she washes 
his one shirt." 

On a recent occasion the Archbishop of York referred to the sad con- 
dition, physical, mental, and moral, of an extensive district of London, 
closing his statement with the following facts : 

" Not half the Gentile adults can read. Half the women cannot handle a 
needle. Our Mothers' Meeting has seventy members, half of whom, though 
living with men and having families, are unmarried, and this is the proportion 
throughout the Gentile district. Nine families out of ten have but one small 
room in which to live, eat and sleep. Not one family in six possesses a blanket 
or a change of clothing. Not one in four has any bedding beyond a sacking, 
containing a little flock or chopped straw (a miserable substitute for a mattress)! 
Not one in twenty has a clock — not one in ten a book. Many of the houses are 
in the most wretched condition of dirt and filth— walls, ceilings, floors, and 
staircases broken and rotting. Drunkenness, brawling, blasphemy, and other 
sins are fearfully prevalent." 

Speaking of one of the London poorhonses a journalist tells his 
readers of "naked misery wallowing in its filth, of human creatures 
massed together more disgustingly than hogs in a stye," thereto adding 
that the Poor Law Commission had expressed regret at having no 
power to compel remedy of the "disgraceful nuisance."* 

Why is it that such things are ? Because the policy of England looks 
to underworking the local manufacturers of the world — to driving the 
poor Hindoo from the loom to the field— and for that reason needs low 
priced labor. Because man is there daily more and more regarded as a 
mere instrument to be used by trade. Because, according to a writer in 
the Times, " every advance on the present rate of wages is a certain 
retrograde step in the direction of Protection. Let Freetraders, then," 
as he adds, " take care that in advocatiug the ' rights of labor' they are 
not digging a grave for free trade." 

It is thus the trade that is to be protected, not the people. 

The position of England is now a very unfortunate one. So long as 
she controlled in a great degree the supply of coal and iron for the world, 
and monopolized the use of steam, she remained almost mistress of the 
world. Just, however, as intelligence becomes more and more dissemi- 

* Since writing the above the author has had, for the first time in many 
years, occasion to visit the asylum provided by the city in which he lives for 
its blind and its lame, its lunatics and its drunkards, its infants and its aged, 
dependent on the public for support, and has been greatly gratified at witness- 
ing the scrupulous neatness everywhere evident, and the manifestation through- 
out of a Christian charity scarcely to be believed by those who have not seen it. 



36 

nated the sceptre passes from her hands. France aud Belgium are 
rivalling her with regard to engines, and even in her own market. Ger- 
many passes ahead of her in reference to steel, and America furnishes 
locomotives that command the admiration of Europe at the Paris exhi- 
bition. Steam gave her power to make the law of the ocean, but steam 
in other hands has now, in effect, destroyed that British navy upon whose 
creation hundreds of millions have been wasted.* With every step else- 
where made in the development of mind her power has declined, and the 
tendency in that direction must increase with wonderful rapidity should 
success attend the present efforts at substituting fluid hydro-carbons, 
readily susceptible of transportation, for the bulky and expensive solid 
the supply of which for the world has so long been almost monopolized 
by Britain. 

Little more than half a century since Britain dictated the law of the 
ocean, doing then the same on the laud, and doing it by means of armies 
that compared favorably with those of any country in the world — the 
joint contributions of Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, the statesmen of 
northern English counties, and little proprietors everywhere. Forty 
years later, shortly before the opening of the last decade, it was with 
difficulty that she raised the little force required for service in the Crimean 
war. To-day, judging from statements in the public journals, it is found 
almost as difficult to keep on foot the forces required for maintaining 
order in Ireland and India. Seeking now the cause of the remarkable 
change that, as regards both quantity and quality, has so obviously oc- 
curred, we find it in the facts, that famine and pestilence have combined 
for rendering Ireland a place so entirely unfit for human occupation as to 
threaten its abandonment by all but those who by reason of disease, 
decrepitude, and poverty, are deprived of power to emigrate ;f that 
the Highlanders, so long renowned for feats of arms, have been dis- 
placed by flocks of sheep ; that the important class of small proprietors, 
intermediate between the mere laborer and the great landlord — that 
class which furnished Cromwellian armies and since has given to the 
country so large a portion of its most valuable men — has been replaced 
by the mere day laborer, recipient of wages in the factory or in the field. J 
The source of supply having been thus dried up, diminution of mental, 
moral, and physical force now presents itself as the necessary conse- 
quence. 

That her position before the world of Europe has greatly deteriorated 

* "Our great wooden fleet, so long the pride of Britain, the terror of the 
world, lies stored up in I'ortsniouth harbor, of no earthly use in maintaining 
any maritime contest. Those noble three-deckers, such as the Duke of Wel- 
lington, would be sent to the bottom by a single gun carrying a three hundred 
pound ball. We have, at one blow, virtually lost the fleet which had been 
growing up for two hundred years." — Sir A. Allison. 

f In the six years ending 1863, the quantity of land in cultivation diminished 
to the extent of 350,000 acres. Last year, 1866, the diminution was 129,000, 
emigration having carried off 102,000 persons, a larger proportion of whom than 
usual were males. 

X " Great Britain is the only country of the world in which the majority of the 
inhabitants subsist on wages, and consequently there is no other country in 
which the government by the greatest number would be so dangerous to pro- 
perty." — Saturday Revieio. 



37 

has been fully shown by one of her own ablest writers, Mr. Matthew 
Arnold.* The reason for the change he has described may be found in the 
expression of Mirabeau hereinbefore quoted, to the effect, that "when 
the head is allowed to grow too large, the body becomes apoplectic and 
wastes away"— the state of things precisely that has, under the system 
denounced by Adam Smith, grown up in Britain. The head is there 
found in a small district embracing perhaps a fifth of the United King- 
dom, the body extending throughout the world and embracing hundreds 
of millions of people, all of whom have been so wholly deprived of the 
exercise of Will that, as in the case of the salt manufacture of India, 
they have been compelled to remain idle when they would have wished 
to work, and to buy from abroad commodities the raw materials of which 
they have seen going to waste at home. 

England's essential difficulty is to be found in the entire absence of a 
national conscience. "In the eyes of her people," says M. de Tocque- 
ville, "that which is most useful to England is always the cause of justice," 
the "criterion of what is right, or noble, or just," being "to be found, 
in the degree of favor or opposition to English interests." Such being 
her standard it affords no cause for wonder that she should, in her 
foreign relations, have adopted the Jesuit maxim that " the end sanctifies 
the means," publicly proclaiming that "the smuggler was the great re- 
former of the age; that the illicit trade in opium must be maintained 
even at the cost of stirring up anarchy among the hundreds of millions 
of Chinese people ; and that, in the interests of trade, it was needed to 
break up the Union of these American States, even at the cost of setting 
at defiance well-known principles of public law. 

That the " balance of power" may continue to be held by any nation 
there is required, as the reader has seen in a passage already quoted from 
the Westminster Review, not only development of its material resources, 
but also "an honest and constant allegiance to the laws of morality in 
its domestic policy and in its foreign relations." How far that condition 
is being even now complied with is shown in the following passage from 
a recent work already more than once referred to : — 

"With regard to the foreign jurisdiction, it may be said that this 
system is the chief cause of wars, and that it is inexpedient for any State 
to incur the risks of war for the sake of securing license and impuuity 
to the criminal class— for well-behaved people do not require the inter- 
vention of the consuls. Earl Grey has set forth in the House of Lords, 
what has been generally admitted, that. our war with China, undertaken 
for the purpose of enforcing the importation of opium, weakened the 
government of China, so as to produce the anarchy which now desolates 
that country. Lord Grey pointed out last session that the foreign juris- 
diction was producing the same effects in Japan, by stimulating the 
license of the European community, who find themselves released from 
all restraint ; that this trampling upon the self-respect of the Japanese 
must lead to war ; and that, after much bloodshed and expenditure, we 
shall perhaps reduce Japan to a state of anarchy like that we have 
brought about in China, "f 

* Cornhill Magazine, February 10, 1866, article My Countrymen. 
f The East and the West, or our Dealiugs with our Neighbors. 



The "balance" of material power is no longer in Britain's hands. 
That what yet remains of moral influence must speedily pass away will 
be obvious to all who reflect on the fact that the moral feeling of the 
world has been and is now being daily more and more offended — 

By the spectacle of overgrown wealth at home side by side with a 
destitution the most complete : 

By the pro-slavery tendencies of a system that at home produces a 
necessity for cheapening labor, and has elsewhere led to advocacy of 
negro slavery as the only mode by which to obtain cheap cotton : 

By the spectacle of a neighbor nation — one that in the past had given 
to Britain her ablest statesmen and most distinguished soldiers — now 
passing rapidly out of existence : 

By the tyranny over hundreds of millions of Asiatics, feeble as they 
are, that is daily exercised, and recently so well described by Earl Grey 
in the passage that has above been given. 

Of all, however, that has occurred throughout the decade, there is 
nothing that, equally with the alliance between the governing portion 
of the British people and that portion of the American one which was 
engaged in the effort to establish a slave republic, has tended to destroy 
that moral force which constitutes so essential a portion of the capital 
of an individual or a nation. 

" A nation," says a reflecting British writer, " which resists in principle 
the just social impulses natural to its history and position — which dis- 
courages those honorable social emotions with which men regard the 
proceedings of men — is sure to find, sooner or later, that the forces which 
she has thus kept back from their regular modes of expansion have found 
outlets and channels within her own borders less regular, and therefore 
more perilous and uncertain. Adherence simply to negative precepts 
[laisser faire] seldom obtains in any sphere of policy without being, in 
a greater or less degree, the mark of all the rest. Aud it is so here. 
* * * We fail to set to work with will and indomitable resolution 
at the task of relieving Ireland from anarchy. We fail to perform, or 
even to see clearly the pressing necessity of performing, the positive duty 
of devising some means, and means there must be somewhere in the 
minds of men, for finally uniting Ireland to ourselves and removing our 
heaviest reproach in the eyes of Europe. We are innocent, again, of 
wishing the poor and ignorant any ill, but there is no sign of a diligent 
and determined national action to ameliorate their condition and diminish 
their numbers. And so on throughout all the spheres of government. To 
that watery self-satisfaction which comes of the discharge of negative 
duties we are entitled. * * * An energetic, full-blooded, and gener- 
ous initiative is no more seen. Under our present set of social concep- 
tions it is forever impossible. The idea of the two great functions of the 
State is torpid or extinct. The nourishment of a strong and harmonious 
national life, in the first place; in the second, the maintenance of a wise, 
unselfish, and upright international life ; these are the two ideas at present 
fatally wanting in English policy. * * * If anybody thinks that we 
are playing that powerful and beneficent part in our relations with Europe 
to which our material strength and moral disinterestedness entitle us, or 
rather which they demand from us, let him reflect that the counsels which 
Lord Stanley is said to be pressing both at Berlin and Paris count for 



39 

about as rauch as if they came from the cabinet of Sweden or of Po 
gal." — Morley. Fortnightly Review, May, 1867. 

More than thirty years since there was in Britain what was callec 
"Reform," but it was limited to changes of form, leaving the polit 
untouched. The result is seen in the facts here given. Now again, ther 
is to be a great reform. Will it, however, prove more successful than 
the former one ? Most certainly not, if the cheap labor system is to be 
maintained. Not, if the laws of morality are to be, as now, daily set 
at defiance in the treatment of the 500,000,000 of Asiatics so much 
subjected to British influence. Not, if all the poor and weak communities 
of the world are to be driven, at the point of the bayonet, to confining 
themselves to the work of raising raw produce for distant markets, the 
proper work of the barbarian and the slave, and of them alone. Not, 
if Britain shall continue to have for her motto, in all international rela- 
tions, that "the end sanctifies the means." Not, certainly, if British 
policy shall continue to set at defiance, as it now daily does, that great 
law of Christianity which teaches that duty to our Creator and to our 
fellow men demands that we do unto others as we would that they should 
do unto us. 

§ 13. The decade whose history has above been sketched is of all re- 
corded in the world's annals the most remarkable, yet are the changes 
there exhibited but preparation for new and greater in the future — such 
changes as must not only greatly affect the relative positions of the com- 
munities that have been named, but also the future of all mankind. Their 
character will, as the writer thinks, be clearly obvious to those who may 
have studied his "Principles," published ten years since, and with their 
aid have studied this review of what has since transpired. To all such 
it must be plain — 

That the system which looks to having but one " workshop for the 
world" is unchristian, aud can but little longer be maintained : 

That England has passed her zenith, and that, in common with Tyre, 
Carthage, Venice, Holland, and all other merely trading communities 
that had preceded her, she is destined, and that at an early day, to take 
her place among the great powers of the past : 

That France, under the centralizing system of the empire, must in- 
evitably follow in the same direction : 

That, in accordance with a great law from the study of which we learn 
that the richest soils are always last to be brought under cultivation, the 
great powers of the future must be Germany, Russia, and these United 
States : 

That, to the end that they may attain the position now so clearly 
within their reach, it is essential that they recognize the facts, that agri- 
culture is the great pursuit of man and therefore always last to attain 
development ; that for attainment of that development it is indispensa- 
ble that there be a proper co-ordination of the societary positives and 
negatives, producers and consumers being brought in close proximity 
with each other ; that the closer their relations the greater must be the 
rapidity of circulation ; and that — 

The more rapid the circulation the more thorough becomes 
the development of the christian man, the more rapid the 
growth of wealth, and the greater the societary force. 




40 013 607 793 4 

14. Materialism, elsewhere described as the " Philosophy of declining; 
terns," is the essential characteristic of that one which seeks to make 
Britain the single " workshop of the world." Looking; to the things 
odnced, and the wagons, cars, and ships by which they are carried, it 
holly rejects consideration of the beings by whom they are produced. 
Regarding trade as the one thing needful it sanctions all the immorali- 
ties by which traffic may be promoted, careless of the fact that their con- 
stant perpetration tends necessarily towards sinking man to a level with 
the brute. 

Looking always to development of the real man Adam Smith de- 
nounced the " mercantile system" upon which Britain so long has prac- 
tised. Following in the same direction the system here given presents 
to view the grand and harmonious laws by means of which it was pro- 
vided that man should ultimately become master of nature — master over 
himself — a being capable of the exercise of Will and fitted to "look 
through nature up to nature's God" — becoming daily more and more con- 
scious of the facts, that duty required him to do to others as he would that 
they should do unto him ; and, that for the proper use of the power with 
which he had been intrusted he must hold himself responsible, here and 
hereafter, to his fellow men and to the great Author of his being. For 
the accomplishment of that object the societary laws were instituted, aud 
thus was society made the instrument by means of which man — the real 
man — was to be developed, to become the subject of that higher branch of 
knowledge which treats of the human soul and its relations, and known 
as psychological science. 

Quite recently the author has made acquaintance with Oersted's work, 
entitled " Soul in Nature,"* and has been greatly gratified to find that, 
starting from a point directly opposite, so illustrious a philosopher had 
been led to arrive at the same conclusions, to wit, that "the laws of 
nature hold good throughout the universe ;"f and that, as " the truths 
of natural science continually approach nearer those of Religion," both 
" must at last be united in the most intimate connection."! 

* Loudon, 1852. Of this eminent man, Sir John Herschell, now thirty years 
since, at a meeting of the British Association, spoke as follows : — 

" In science there was hut one direction which the needle would take, when 
pointed towards the European continent, and that was towards his esteemed 
friend, Professor Oersted. He knew not how to speak of him in his presence 
without violating some of that sanctity by which, as an individual, he was 
surrounded. To look at his calm manner, who could think that he wielded such 
an intense power, capable of altering the whole state of science, and almost con- 
vulsing the knowledge of the world. * * * * The electric telegraph, and 
other wonders of modern science, were but mere effervescences from the surface 
of this deep recondite discovery, which Oersted had liberated, and which was 
yet to burst with all its mighty force upon the world. If he were to characterize 
by any figure the advantage of Oersted to science, he would regard him as a 
fertilizing shower descending from heaven, which brought forth a new crop, 
delightful to the eye and pleasing to the heart." 

t Ibid., p. 92. % Ibid., p. 109. 



Erratum. — Page 12, line 16 from foot— -for " national" read " material." 



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